FruFra

PeteSearch: What the Sumerians can teach us about data

2012-01-03T09:33:00.001-05:00

Please read the post linked and think about the data we collect on students.
How can we make grading a more neutral act?
How do we convince others that they do not have the power or should not have the power?
How is the data I collect corrupting me?
How is the data our schools collect corrupting them, and in the process making them less valuable?
How do we be more open that all data collected has it base in subjective humanity?
Do we regularly look over the data we collect and try to find where it is giving us bogus information?
(Via Nat Torkington http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/01/four-short-links-3-january-201-1.html )

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The Physics of Osmos Contest « The Physics of Osmos

2011-11-18T20:35:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the Physics of Osmos Contest!

Students in grades K-12 are invited to explore the endless physics embedded within the beautiful game Osmos.
Create a one-minute video illustrating the physics concept that you discover in the game. The top student entry will win a $500 gift card to Amazon.com. The top three runners up will also receive prizes.

To submit your entry, follow the instructions below.

Download and install the Osmos free demo. (Or purchase Osmos from the App Store.)

Experiment with your gameplay to illustrate physics concepts using Osmos as your virtual lab.

Review the official contest rules

Create a video illustrating a physics concept.
(If you want to record your screen, try Jing or ScreenChomp)

Upload your video to YouTube, Vimeo, or Screencast.com

Complete the submission form by 11:59 PM PST. December 18, 2011.

Winners will be announced on December 25.

via physicsofosmos.wordpress.com

A good friend of mine came up with this contest idea. I think this will motivate a certain type of physics student. Give it a try.

By the way this idea is part our ongoing conversation around the question, what would a compelling online physics course look like. Lots of questions and no answers yet.

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Compelling Technology: Cell Phone Camera

2011-06-29T14:43:00.001-04:00

I was in school for a few hours Monday and stopped by an art class that is going on in the morning for four weeks in the summer. We are a one to one MacBook district but in the summer we take the laptops in for re-imaging. So when I walked into the art room and saw a cell phone picture turning into art I smiled and took this picture. You cannot hold back compelling technology.

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The Little People Gather To Worship

2011-05-23T22:27:00.001-04:00

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Using Google Docs in 3rd Grade: A Road Map To Curriculum Mapping

2011-05-18T19:36:00.001-04:00

via thethinkingstick.com

I love this post and it reminded me to put in print some thoughts that have been floating around in my head. To me this post is what curriculum reporting and mapping must look like in 2011. It is an example on two levels. First, Jeff's post is reporting. He has gathered curricular data, commented on it and published it for any interested party to see. Second, and perhaps most important, the teacher by having class has produced both a map of her curriculum and a transparent ability to see what is happening. All this and the map and transparency were done by the students.

I have done a lot of work over the years in the name of curriculum. Some of it has remained unused by anyone. For years my map was a list of topics with chapters and investigations hand written on one sheet of paper. I feel like in 2011 our curriculum maps need to be open, transparent, available, flexible, and living. Most importantly they need to seem useful to all participants: students, teachers, administrators, parents, politicians and the public.

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What is the scaffolding for learning in public? | Beth’s Blog

2011-05-16T21:44:00.001-04:00

via bethkanter.org

Here is another piece of the puzzle for curriculum tracking. I loved this blog about working in the open, and it has tons of valuable links in it to examples. If everyone involved in schools was open with their work like this then we would all be building our curriculum maps as part of the process of what we do.

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Simple Drawing Bot

2011-03-07T14:43:00.001-05:00

p620.mov Watch on Posterous

DC circuit study or art?

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South side

2011-01-19T16:18:00.001-05:00

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Again

2011-01-08T08:28:00.001-05:00

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World Made New

2011-01-08T08:27:00.001-05:00

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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WolframAlpha in Physics

2010-12-26T07:44:00.001-05:00

For about a year and a half now I have been using WolframAlpha (WA) in class. Students may use it for any assignment or assessment. This changes the problems that you assign. Drastically.

Many easy problems can be simply cut and past into WA and solved. So what becomes important is assigning problems that get at the real skills we would like students to have from problems. Problems that they have to break apart and digest and put together the simple things that WA can solver for them. This is not unlike what I do when I solve problems in my own work.

What I did not know until now was how little of that kind of problem solving I used to teach. I assign many fewer problems that are much harder and require a ton more thinking. Since this is not what I am used to many of my old methods of teaching problem solving are not working as well. Here is the punch line: WA is making me think that I need to have my students talk more about the problems they are solving. This technology is making me see a need for my students to be more social. I should have read Frank's post more closely.

There are so many complaints out there that technology makes us less social, but I think in the end it frees us to be more social. But it is hard work getting there.

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Gene Norris

2010-12-23T20:02:00.001-05:00

I have been using Bluefire Reader to read ePub books from the library on the iPad. I have not checked this many books out from the library in years.

I love Pat Conroy's storytelling and I have been reading My Reading Life. My favorite book by him is the must read teacher book, The Water Is Wide. I ran across this quote about his favorite English teacher, "'Mr. Norris acted like I was the most important girl in the world.' she said. 'You were. That was Gene's secret. All of us were.'"

I am starting a collection of quotes the exemplify what I am currently calling a posture of the image of God. This posture is a combination of two ideas that I have been toying with. In the Kalyanpur and Harry's book Culture in Special Education the propose that special education teachers need a, "posture of cultural reciprocity." Their idea is that you cannot understand the needs of a student and their family until you have some handle on what is cultural to both you and the student. Since you are the teacher you are the one who has to build into your life a posture of always looking to learn about those around you. The book is another must read.

I tied this idea to one I got from CS Lewis in The Weight of Glory [PDF], "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors." This caught my attention because of another quote, this one unattributed brought to me by a professor this summer, "There is a part of who God is that only gets expressed through who you are."

Teaching means to have a posture of the image of God. Whoever you run into has some piece of the image of God that you will only see by looking closely at that person. As a teacher I need to work to bring this unique piece of God's image out in each student. This is the task of revealing the immortal, of helping students, "know fully, just as [they] have been fully known."

Gene Norris had a posture of the image of God, whether he knew it or not.

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Drawing Graphs

2010-11-23T09:02:00.001-05:00

These students are doing problems. Very traditional problems. Yet they are drawing graphs to start. This is one of the things that starting with inquiry does. Since they started with graphs of data they are more likely to draw graphs of problems, which better mimics how real problems are solved.

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Doing What Works

2010-11-14T20:41:00.001-05:00

via dww.ed.gov

Click through and listen to this teacher on using presentations to asses student learning. He lays out perfectly what a valuable use of class time presentations can be if they teacher is working hard to make them valuable. I particularly love that he is going to the groups and telling them ahead of time what his questions will be. This makes the kids feel empowered and motivated to learn.

This tab was to the right of my twitter tab, so I think I owe a debt of gratitude to @fnoschese for this link.

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Family

2010-10-28T05:40:00.001-04:00

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qBits | Announcing Air Sketch 2.0, with PDF projection!

2010-10-12T21:06:00.001-04:00

via qrayon.com

I installed this update as soon as I saw it and PDF import is an incredible addition to AirSketch. Now you can export a PDF from your favorite presentation software and display it from your iPad on the projector in your room and annotate the slides. Better yet, students can do the same.

There is a post in this, but I am using the Dropbox program and app to transfer PDFs. Any better ideas on moving PDFs to and from the iPad?

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qBits | MSNBC selects Air Sketch for use on Air

2010-10-04T20:40:00.001-04:00

via qrayon.com

I have been using this program in a similar way to use the iPad school is letting me play with to control my screen. Today I had several breakthroughs that are moving me closer and closer to thinking that this is the way to go. In the past my classroom has used the awesome combination of Skitch and a Wacom Graphire Wireless, and I still love and recommend that combination to anyone looking at a traditional interactive white board. Much cheaper, much more student, subject and learning focused and significantly cheaper. Above all this, it just works which is important for teachers. Teachers do not use stuff that does not work every time.

That being said I am trying AirSketch on the iPad. Why? because it is cheap as well. The combo that I use is about $300, but if you buy the pads from Promethian or Mimio they will set you back north of $400. Lately I have see iPad popping up on the refurbished list for $450. So if you can make it work as well as these other options, for only $50 more you also have a iPad instead of a hunk of plastic. And, since the connection is through your wireless network there is little chance of interference like there is with my Wacom.

Two things happened today to make it click that AirSketch might just be the right thing. First, I accidently two finger zoomed, and sure enough I could fill in details in a section of my drawing. Details are much easier to draw with a pen than a finger. The AirSketch app makes detail possible by allowing you to zoom in and work in a small area. Before I knew this I was not able to fit an entire problem on a page.

Second, I figured out how to take a screen shot using my iPad, this is then 3 clicks away from being a background to draw on in AirSketch. For me this is essential, since most of my homework is online. I used to surf to a problem that a students asks about and screen shot it with Skitch and go. Now I surf on the iPad to the problem, screen shot it by pressing the Power button and the iPad button at the same time, then switch to AirSketch and pull it out of the photo gallery and draw on it to help the students.

What is super cool is now I can also give it to the students, since they can see where they are writing. If only the iPad had four finger swipe application switching we would be all set.

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Marla Coleman: The value of summer camp | SummitDaily.com

2010-10-03T21:46:00.001-04:00

Thousands of my colleagues across the nation will attest to the power of camp. No grades. No permanent records. Just authentic connections to the real world. Play is the work of childhood; it's how children invent and re-invent themselves, find their place in the universe, and learn what they are good at and where they need to practice. Life is the quintessential test tomorrow's leaders need to pass.

via summitdaily.com

I love this and the rest of this post on what camps can teach schools. Every kid deserves to learn the lessons of camp. School can be that place. In my case I keep my physics room filled with physics stuff to play with. I ask students to explore their world and try to teach them how to do that well, because they will be doing that the rest of their lives.

In short I have spent a educational career trying to bring camp to the classroom, because it is the most effective way to teach for real learning.

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Family

2010-09-24T19:04:00.001-04:00

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Physics Is Streetlights

2010-09-23T19:47:00.001-04:00

via chartercities.org

So we bounced balls and we modeled the real world with some math. I even had students with graphing calculators out with no prompting. We figured out that we can do the basics of this physics thing. But why would we do this physics thing?

I had the students look at this picture for a few minutes. Actually 3.5 minutes exactly. I do this thing where when I give them time to complete a task I open up my iTunes and play a song the length that I give them to work. I even have music sets for longer periods of time. And just in case that is not enough the last song in a set is always orchestral in nature so they know that work time is coming to an end.

I asked them to write about the picture. Start with just noticing details and then ask questions about the picture. What do you want to know about what is going on?

"In this picture, the first thing that i saw right away was the race of all 7 men. They are of course sitting in the streets and they have notebooks and books with them. As people would get stereotyped into the group as "People who live in the projects, have no future". But looking at this picture made me feel like they wanted to better themselves and better their lives and get an education. That was my first assumption. Also, it looks dark outside, and they are outside reading. I'm not sure if it was night or early morning. If it's the morning, it made me feel like they were maybe waiting for a bus or about to go to school. If it's at night, maybe some of them don't have homes with electricity. So they need light to see what they are reading. Their cloths look rugged and worn. They aren't the newest, yet they aren't the oldest. But as I looked into every each and one of their faces, you can just see the determination and dedication they have to better their lives, and actually have and hold a future, instead of risk themselves surviving without an education for the rest of their life."

What teacher needs to say anything when the students bring that kind of heat? What if we brought that to our studies? What if we had a reason to bring that kind of dedication to our studies? The students do not know the question ahead of them yet. The big question will hopefully make their studies this important. And physics is what brings us light today.

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Project Based Learning Resources

2010-07-08T13:35:00.001-04:00

I had great conversation yesterday about project based learning. I think a well designed project with an authentic audience is the thing that all students need. The conversation surrounded the benefits to honors students. I followed up with this email.

Here is a blog post with some project resources. Specifically this document mentioned in that post is a document I read over before finalizing any plans for a project.

Edutopia.org, in spite of the very idealistic name, is also an excellent resource. Here is a great reading list of their favorite articles on project based learning.

Two last things, both of them personal. Here is a link to my blog. Here is a link to where I keep my web bookmarks on projects. It will update as I find new interesting things.

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Culture in Special Education - Image of God

2010-07-02T12:17:00.001-04:00

I have been refining my thoughts on what it means to bear the image of God. What are the fundamental human characteristics?

God uniquely creates all humans each day.
All humans live in brokenness each day.
God requires us to carry each other through the brokenness each day.

Kalyanpur and Harry's describe a "posture of cultural reciprocity" (pp. 118-119) as a solution to communication problems with parents of special education students. It described treating all people like they bear the image of God. I thought of God creating me through being a reflective person. "In other words, first ask yourself, 'Why?'" (p. 118) When they tell me to find out about the culture of the person I am trying to help, I know I am asked to help. When they ask me to give of myself to aid the understanding of others, I know that is required of me. When through this process a good solution is found, a solution that will carry us all through the brokenness, I should not be surprised. As God uses us to create each other, we find a way to carry each other.

"If we seek to understand ourselves and the families who we serve at every intersection, however small, then the task will seem less onerous." (pp. 130 - 131) Carrying each other and allowing ourselves to be created is an everyday occurrence. Like having a posture of cultural reciprocity, it cannot just be used when needed. Each of us is unique, therefore it requires a lot of work to understand everyone we serve. We cannot ever be the same as anyone else, "but that we have the willingness to learn about and understand their experiences, that we are willing to understand how our own experiences have shaped us, and that we respect and accept these differences in our various experiences" (p.131) helps us carry and create each other every day.

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Culture in Special Education - Work

2010-07-02T08:32:00.001-04:00

Kalyanpur and Harry use "two criteria [to define] meaningful work: 1)It should be essential in that if one individual did not undertake the task another would have to, and 2) it should be paid." (p. 111)

We often hear the argument that one of the objectives of school is to prepare students for the world of work. In the case of special education students, it means specifically that parents and professionals will be setting goals for the work a student might do. At first read, I underlined the quote above and thought it was a good working definition of work. But, it was followed up with this, "As Harry and Kalyanpur pointed out, however, these criteria do not apply to all valued work even within the mainstream: work such as that of housewife... and that of an entertainer or an artist... These criteria also do not apply to entrepreneurs who create new new kinds of businesses for which there was no previous demand." (p. 111)

What is totally interesting to me is the arguments that we made for bringing laptops into the school mirror much closer the needs of the efforts that are outside the working definition of work. We never claimed that test scores would go up or that students would be better workers. We claimed they would be more creative, artistic, expressive, and musical because we see the laptops as the ultimate creativity machine. We claimed students would be more collaborative, and raising children requires support and collaboration. We claimed students would be more creative problem solvers, thinking outside the box like entrepreneurs.

May be this is cliche to say, but I am glad that we are not preparing students for the world of work. We are helping students become who God wants them to be. That will include using amazing skills in places of work and other places they never imagined to bring God's Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

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Culture in Special Education - Parenting

2010-07-02T08:30:00.001-04:00

"More and more, the task of child rearing no longer remains solely in the hands of parents and extended family but has come to be shared with experts and paid professionals who design, oversee, and provide services." (p. 81)

A couple of weeks ago at camp I was sitting on the floor of the lodge building, listening to the rain and participating in chapel. I watched as a counselor a few rows up from me turned to try and get a camper to sit still. At first I thought it was going to be just a look, but then I saw that the camper was struggling to put his arms in has t-shirt. It was cold that morning and the camper had not worn a jacket. The counselor quickly figured out what was happening and handed over his coat. The camper eagerly participated in the rest of the chapel.

The camper could very easily have been a fidgety eight year old. We make assumptions about students behavior all the time. It seems much rarer that we look for ways to figure out what the problem really is. We assume that when something goes wrong it is the same reason every time. Like eight year old boys just cannot sit still. Kalyanpur and Harry argue that right and wrong are not so easy to define in parenting. They argue that most parenting decisions are built on a few continuums that reflect the culture and realities of their life. For example, one parent might make a decision with only the nuclear family involved. On the other side of the spectrum there may be families for whom descisions have to go through a large extended family before they can be made. This extened family may even include, "fictive kin" (Stack, 1975, p. 59) who are not related at all.

I really like the image of parenting choices being a set of sliders, like the sliders on a color chooser. Every kid, reflecting the uniqueness that God created them with will end up a unique color. Each decision about how to help a child become involves adjusting some sliders, like how many people are considered family, and how hierarchical the family is; or how involved the family is at that stage the person is at. As people who love a child, it is important that we all communicate where we think the sliders be adjusted to and why. It is also incredibly important that we listen to the other who have a stake in those sliders as well.

As I read this, I thought a lot about discipline. It is hard to talk about discipline publicly. As a technology coordinator I get involved in discipline issues. The cultures at the places where I have worked with kids seems to be that parents, teachers and administrators all want to put in the good work to help everyone navigate the complicated waters that we have today. I think this respects the uniqueness of each child and family while building the community to be more resilient against the forces that would normally break us down.

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Culture in Special Education - Objectivit

2010-07-02T08:03:00.001-04:00

"Objectivity is highly valued in the low-context culture of Western professionalism, the assumption being that professionals are likely to diagnose and remediate more effectively when they are not emotionally involved with their clients and when the process is informed by a scientifically based and, therefore, objective body of knowledge that yields universal solutions. Indeed, the concept of objectivity itself is essentially Western." (p. 51)

I am struggling with what role objectivity plays in the life of an educator. The more I practice the more I think it does not belong. There is no way to do something so human as educate a child, really to find truth together with a child, and do it without putting your own heart in the game. All that objectivity serves to do is distance me from the subject and from the learner, and in my experience, increased distance does not help learning. This quote hit me hard because I have been deeply struggling with what true objectivity is, and this has been a core struggle. Then to think that the idea of objectivity might just be a cultural artifact from the scientific revolution shakes me up even more.

Here is why the struggle to define objectivity is important to a technology coordinator. We are asked to evaluate the one to one laptop program all the time. Currently numbers define educational success, but numbers do not tell the story. In some sense numbers are not objective. You have to come and visit. You have to talk with our teachers about the impact of technology on learning. You have to hear the stories of students creating their learning. Objectivity is a, "judgment based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices" and as such seeks truth. We should make observations. We should allow those observation to shape us, in fact we have to because they become part of our experience. If we learn something from an observation we will not remain uninfluenced. It will be personal because learning is personal.

What I strive for in helping people understand the impact of technology on teaching and learning is understanding. I want them to learn from me and my wonderful colleagues. I do not really want them to have an objective opinion. I want them to to be impacted by experience and put their own imprint on me. Just like I want my students to explore their worlds and show me the great new things that they find.

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Culture in Special Education - IQ

2010-07-01T19:03:00.001-04:00

"The problem with IQ and other standardized test is that they overlook the fact that children are competent in multiple domains, such as kinesthetic, and interpersonal skills, and not just the academic domains that IQ tests measure" (p. 36)

People sometimes ask what books are on my reading list. recently it has just been things I am reading for class, like Culture in Special Education. However, I also try to read things that I find referenced from two different sources. So if I am going through my twitter feed and see two people who do not know each other comment on a book that they are reading, I add it to my Amazon wish list for later reading.

I did not originally underline the quote above as I read. However, it was one of my classmates favorite quotes. I am very thankful to her for pointing it out. It fits my test for a good future read, except it is a test for something that is true. The education blogs love quotes like the one above because of the call for changing school to be more individual and student centered. They love it because it talks about needing to nurture each learner or like Proverbs 22:6 says, "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." (KJV) The point of the proverb is that each child has a way. Each child has a unique, creative, Kingdom-building way to go.

Therefore, it is good to hear the same news in a different arena. And to think, if it were not for a colleague I would have read right past it.

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Culture in Special Education - Individualism

2010-06-30T23:10:00.001-04:00

Americans are individualistic. There may be many faults with this, but there is no getting away from the basic truth. In reading Chapter 2 of Culture in Special Education I learned that there is a very intentional affirming of this in our special education laws. The laws are set up to make every American as independent as they can be, "to ensure that individuals who posses a trait -- an 'immutable characteristic' -- that could reduce their chances for making choices toward the pursuit of happiness will not be denied these opportunities." (p. 27) The law also seems to require an independent American parent to advocate for the services a child qualifies for.

The point the authors make is that this culture of individualism does not work for every sub-culture in the United States. Certain "families may be both unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the prevailing 'culture of rights' on which American special education policy and therefore, practice are based." (p.26) If the goal is pursuit of happiness for all Americans, is it acceptable that we would have certain sub-cultures who cannot access the services that would give them this right. One could argue that in figuring out how to achieve the services the sub-culture become more American, but one could also argue that if they never get the services the sub-culture risks never joining the greater culture. Either way, this is a great example of two cultures tugging at each other as they work to reshape each other.

In my setting I wonder: how have I as a technology coordinator set up an individualistic foundation in our policies, and who am I missing because of this? In my context I still get students who claim to not be computer literate even though they have had a laptop every day of the school year since eighth grade. I wonder if this is because there is little formal help for students who need help using programs. They are told to ask a teacher, a friend, the helpdesk if there is no hardware issues, or try Atomic Learning. We assume that they will advocate for themselves in their learning of computer skills, probably because most of them do. However, the most vulnerable to this problem have the greatest need. I think it will be important going forward that we have student ambassadors that help students new to the school learn about the use of the laptops.

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Culture in Special Education - Individualism

2010-06-30T23:06:00.001-04:00

Culture in Special Education - Individualism

Message from jameslaryn@gmail.com:

Google Docs makes it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

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A Committee That Worked

2010-06-27T14:24:00.001-04:00

I have been a part of a lot of committees in my professional life. None has worked towards a goal like the K-12 Technology Committee. This committee was tasked with evaluating the past uses of technology in school and setting a vision for the future. It was made of of an administrative facilitator, a couple of building principals, the Technology Director and a teacher from each building in our district. Each year we would meet during the school day to discuss where we had been. Over the last year. The administrative facilitator had a good solid agenda and the we were asked to prepare for the meeting. There were reports, but mainly we discussed teaching and learning and how it changed with access to technology.

I remember vividly the day that we talked about the impact of laptops on our teaching. Each teaching member of the team had been given a laptop the previous year and we discussed how it had changed our personal lives and our professional lives. While this seems like a trite thing to do now, in 2002 it was an amazing experience. We decided more teachers needed laptops and more rooms needed projectors to go with the laptops.

Then in 2004 we talked about having pushed computer labs as fr as they would go. We felt like we had pushed the computer lab model to it limits. The labs were busy places and filled with learning, but everything else we wanted to do with computers required more. We knew students would each have to have a laptop to take our technology use to the next level. We designed a pilot program for the following school year and we were off. Now every student in sixth through twelfth grade has a laptop. A committee with a leader who is willing to get out of the way, a mandate and a vision is essential to good collaboration.

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Collaborating with Dale

2010-06-27T14:20:00.001-04:00

I remember touring the high school that would eventually hire me for the first time. I was walking down the hall the the principal and saw in the distance Dale. I had been a camp counselor with Dale for three summers and he had told me about the job. I yelled to him like it was camp. Later I learned that he was nervous about that. He wondered if that kind of excitement to see a colleague was going to hurt my chances of getting hired. I was oblivious and they hired me anyway.

At summer camp there is no option but to collaborate. Days are packed with activity and if you share a responsibility with someone you have to trust that they will come through. Our third summer at camp Dale assigned activity leaders. He would come up to me after assigning classes and tell me that I was leading an activity I did not really like to lead, but at least I was leading it with him. That made all the difference. Who I was leading with was more important than what we were leading. From there we could figure it out.

That fall I was assigned to teach the same preparation, earth science, as Dale. I think he thought his work was done when he handed over a copy of his lesson plans from the last few years to me, but one night a month into school I called his home with an idea. We both got excited about teaching the way we had counseled. We were up late word smithing the activity and gathering supplies. Slowly over the next year the course changed. New ideas, new strategies, new goals. The trust and the workflow that we had honed as camp counselors flowed into the classroom. We felt comfortable in our roles, each using our strengths to compliment each other.

Dale helped set my career off on a creative path. Our cooperation helped me to realize that the profession I had entered required using the best of my skills and find someone to help where I fall short. Our collaboration mixed our talents and really modeled what what God created us to be, creative unique individuals working in community to better the world.

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Realities of Teaching

2010-06-08T08:44:00.001-04:00

Here is a link to a (really) long podcast. I have had it waiting in my to listen tag, and Saturday morning a one year old afforded me the time to listen early this morning. Normally podcasts frustrate me a bit because they are not tight enough, there are parts that do not apply to me or my situation and no way to skip them like when reading.

The whole thing was worth a listen for me. It was a heartwarming and honest conversation between educators. They are obviously passionate and talented and some are even famous in the educational technology arena. Yet the reflect openly about struggling to engage their students. They talk about their frustrations with a student productivity. They talk about the life of a teacher. The conversation could have been going on in my teachers lounge or my office as I coach someone.

Good teachers reflect. Good teacher know that there is always room to improve.

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Transitioning to Standards Based Grading

2010-05-30T22:25:00.001-04:00

It is hard to avoid reading about standards based grading. I have even tried it out for half a semester in my physics class this semester. I liked the switch from conversations about point to conversations about physics, instead of students asking how can I get more credit I really did get questions like how can I add a mathematical model to my project? The hardest part for me was writing the standards. Here is an interesting article from a Chemistry Professor with a very clear and concise explanation of how he has added standards to his class, using one of my favorites Blooms Taxonomy. I found this link from a wonderful physics blog.

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Creativity and Homework

2010-05-24T14:45:00.001-04:00

With permission of the author I quote an email from the National Science Teachers Association physics list. There has been quite a debate there about the value of homework. In our one to one district there is also a lot of debate about the value of homework. A laptop environment can render completely useless anything that is copyable. There is no hurdle to it at all. For a while in my physics class CAPA and WebAssign helped, and they still are great tools for kids interested in learning and collaborating, but many kids now cheat on these too. The Internet is filled with answers.

I've personally fought the battle regarding homework, and here's my ultimate conclusion:

Homework should be a creative product. Yes, it should allow students to practice concepts taught in class, allow students to do work outside of the constraints of class time, and it should NOT be copyable. In physics, this can be a challenging task, where standard problem-solving is the norm.

I'm lucky in that I teach a primarily conceptual class. Still, here are some of the things I've done...

1) Photograph (or find online) a picture of an interesting atmospheric phenomenon involving optics. I provide a rubric in which I require students to elaborate on how the electromagnetic spectrum, diffraction, refraction, reflection, dispersion, etc. Then I can display this student work in the hallways for other potential students to see!

2) Create a "story book" involving simple linear displacement, constant velocity, and constant acceleration. Students represent their story (5 or more motions) through pictures, x-t graphs, v-t graphs, a-t graphs, and dot plots (vectors). Students LOVED this assignment.

3) When it comes to doing traditional problems, I have students practice 5 questions or so (I do not grade this), and then I require them to write their own problems, or even to administer them to another student. This is great, because students must confront issues like "What is a reasonable mass or weight of an elephant?"

With all of these approaches, I've NEVER had a student cheat off of another. Students feel like the homework is worthwhile. I don't assign a lot of homework, but when I assign it, I try to make it reasonable and relevant.

I quote this email in entirety because I agree so much with what the author has to say. I will add two reflections to hers.

First, I think that teachers from all disciplines could help make these assignments for each other. In fact I think in all subject areas it requires dialog outside of your department to come up with these. People not in your area will force you to be creative with how you express yourself, and assignment making is one of the ways teachers express themselves. My first year of teaching I was grading a boring assignment in the lounge and I was exhausted by it. A veteran teacher looked over at me and said, "Boring assignments make boring grading." First I thought ouch. Then I thought true.

Second, I learned at MACUL a few year ago the 80-20 rule: 80 percent of the work on a project is the last 20 percent of the presentation. In the film industry once the actors are all filmed, the real work begins, even though 80 percent of what is seen in the movies is on film. The lesson in this for teachers was that since for the most part we are looking for the 80 percent, do not expect the 20. The content and the analysis and the creative direction are what is important to us, not that every i is dotted. My observation here is that if you ask for the 80 percent a lot of kids will give you the 20 percent for free on their own time, because they love the assignment. You can call that homework I guess, but if you require it then it will not get done as well.

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Wordle and Characterization

2010-05-19T11:07:00.001-04:00

I learned something about bias. My tech director sent me a link to blog post about using wordle in the classroom. I have a bias as a science teacher and sometimes overlook the power of words. He smartly copied the whole English department and they responded. Elizabeth took the time to blog about using wordle to analyze characterization. I need to figure out as a tech director how to broaden my search for ideas. It was good to be reminded that some of the best tech training I have done is just showing off something cool and supporting teachers as they run with the tool.

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Ideas for Administrators

2010-05-12T13:28:00.001-04:00

Here are blogs I recommend for administrators.

http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/

http://www.thethinkingstick.com/

http://www.practicaltheory.org/serendipity/

http://blog.scottjelias.net/

http://nurturingfaith.wordpress.com/

Here are specific posts that will lead administrators to all sorts of new resources to expand their horizon.

http://schooltechleadership.org/projects/blogs-administrator/

http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2009/05/top10k12online2008.html

http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2009/05/top20tedtalks.html

Finally a list of specific posts to emphasize the importance of technology using administrators.

http://dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2010/01/if-the-leaders-dont-get-it-it-doesnt-happen.html

http://nurturingfaith.wordpress.com/2010/03/22/the-imperative-of-christian-leadership/

http://nurturingfaith.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/rethinking-integration-of-faith-and-learning/

Any additions?

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Learning Spaces

2010-05-10T20:26:00.001-04:00

This weekend I was watching a little TV (my graduate class is done and my wife was working a night shift, so after the kids were in bed I indulged) and surfing the web. All of a sudden there was a flurry of tweets between two people I follow. They were arguing about school design. I watched in fascination as these two educators tried to push and pull at each others and tease out of each other what each stood for.

One of the educators was Christian Long. He has the distinction of being the very first blogger I ever seriously followed. His posts at Think Lab about how school spaces support and encourage learning were amazing, and he linked his posts full of awesome connections. I am sure that I found half of my initial blog roll through his blog. Without ever knowing it he taught me how to be a lurking member of the edublog community.

The other one was Ira Socol. He is one of the most recent members of my blog roll. I follow him because of a personal rule of blogging. If I run into anyone's posts twice in two different contexts I subscribe to their blog. I first ran into him when he blogged about a visit to HCHS. Then Will Richardson tweeted out a post of Ira's. That is when I also found out that he lives right here in Holland, Michigan.

Everything was going along just fine until a tweet that read, "@ChristianLong No, what was most impressive was the vision of school which drove those design choices. http://is.gd/c0a8t" The link goes to the post about the school that I had some input in designing. I did not have a large input, but I was in several meetings. I lay absolutely no claim to any final design, but I know that the people who designed the building were influenced by articles and ideas that were formed years ago by my reading Christian Long.

Ira followed up today with a great summary of the discussion. To me this demonstrates the power of blogging and twitter. I am sure that neither of these men knew that they were connected so closely. I never would have known if i had not been following them both on twitter. What an amazing connected world we live in.

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NCTM 2010 — Day Two

2010-04-30T13:44:00.001-04:00

At the EML, they decided that homework is best used for …

… between-class work to bridge the gap between today and tomorrow.
… structured, independent work to free up in-class time for social or extended learning. (cf. these guys.)
… study-skill development, for learning how to learn and study math and develop a productive disposition.

Her demonstration assignments required no more paper than what they were printed on and they were further scaffolded by …

… a student contract to the effect that this is a serious class and you will need to complete this work to be successful.
… a teacher contract designed by the students to the effect that the teacher will bring the heat every single day. The practical result of both contracts was largely symbolic but DLB said it set a powerful tone for the course.
… homework kits containing scissors, tape, and other necessary supplies.
… explicitly labeled problems. Three varieties.
1. Independent practice. Skill development, reinforcement, and reflection, designed to be completed without help. In fact, students were told not to get help.
2. Preparation for new work. "Go as far as you can." This was work they hadn't been fully taught, designed to teach tolerance for difficult work and a productive disposition toward math. Students didn't finish the majority of these assignments.
3. Work to be shared. This was to improve home/school communication, to develop a student's ability to narrate her own work. "Share what you're learning with someone in your home."

The EML (which, it must be said, hardly resembles a student's experience in a traditional classroom during a traditional school year) posted a 100% homework submission rate. I'd soften my stance toward homework even further if I could a) get someone to teach me how to create these assignments and b) get several members of my department on board to distribute that creative work.

via feedproxy.google.com

I would love to have a conversation about this attitude towards homework at HCHS. When Dan says, "a) get someone to teach me how to create these assignments and b) get several members of my department on board to distribute that creative work." I definitely have b) in my department, and I think I have people to help me with a) in my school. Now how to make the conversation happen?

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Climate Change

2010-04-21T16:10:00.001-04:00

Download now or watch on posterous

Earth Day Climate Change.mov (43686 KB)

For Earth Day my environmental science class each got one minute to talk about what most impacted them in the discussions a research we have done on climate change. Here is the video. I am very proud of their work and thought that their presentations were artfully done stories.

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Reasons For Camp (School Too?)

2010-04-21T15:33:00.001-04:00

Here is a great article about the importance of camp. The best quote:

Over those same years, I've been repeatedly amazed by how many grown-ups did their most important growing up at camp. Out from under expectations at home (especially the self-fulfilling ones), they blossomed and bloomed into what they otherwise might never have become. Their weeks at summer camp, they'll tell you, sometimes shaped them as much or more than all the rest of the year combined. Which is why, every year, I write a cheque to help send inner-city kids to camp. They may never have heard the word “epiphany,” but they just might experience what it means.

How could we say the same about schools? How do we make schools a place where everyone is constantly growing up?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/summer-camp-launched-my-career/article1535897/

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Banana Batteries & Dan Meyer

2010-04-21T10:53:00.001-04:00

via 101studiostreet.com

An awesome reflection on an awesome talk.

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Wetland Scavenger Hunt

2010-03-29T10:54:00.001-04:00

Here is the lesson I did in Environmental Science this week. I liked it but I also thought I should put it out for comment, because it did not work exactly as planned. My thoughts in no particular order:

I also wish I had a better way of collecting pictures than twitpic.com. Here is a link to the pictures.
I had an absent student add the last eight items after the fact for his credit. I really liked some of his ideas.
I was happy that I had enough kids with cellphone plans that allowed picture messaging for free that I had students in pairs.
My eventual goal is to have students pick a park or place and have them put together these for the parks department so that anyone can go on the scavenger hunts. To do this I need to figure out a public place to post photos and a way of getting the directions to people via text messaging.

Wetland Scavenger Hunt

Find any of these things along the boardwalk through the wetland. Use your phone to take a picture to document your find. Send the picture to username.XXXX@twitpic.com with the subject being the category of the find and the text being your team name. First and unique finds will be worth two points each, other finds will be worth one. The best team will get five points of extra credit on this. Everyone else's score will be out of the best score minus five points.

Good Smelling

Bad Smelling

Makes a Quiet Sound
Makes a Loud Sound
Hairy (NOT human)
Animal sign (NOT human)
Webbed footed Bird
Claw footed Bird
An insect that floats
A flying insect
An amphibian
A wetland plant
Something rough
Something smooth
Signs of people
Something changing
reptiles
fungus
standing water
something out of the ordinary/rare
something you've never seen before.
something growing
something rotting/decomposing
some type of poop
Windmill

Lesson Based On
http://dnr.wi.gov/org/caer/ce/eek/teacher/wetlandsheet.htm

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Functionalism And The Least Of These

2010-03-21T21:52:00.001-04:00

There is no quick fix to the problems facing people who do not start on equal footing in this world. As someone who believes we are all neighbors, and who believes that each of us was created with something to offer the body it is essential that I try first by loving my neighbor.

I am not sure that functionalists would agree. Everything is about the individual and what the individual can achieve. Even when placed in a group the individuals status as a group member is what makes it important, not the group itself. This view of the world rings false.

People in very different spots in life from myself have offered much to me, if only I listen at accept them as my brother or sister. If I create a space people will open up to the depth that all people are created for, a depth that reflects the love that created and redeems each of us. The best I can do for my students is bring them into community with this truth as well.

How do you show students justice your context? How do you bring your students into relationship with the least of these? Do you think it important to relate your students to the broader context of the subjects you teach? As a science teacher I was taught about interacting with concepts, inquiry, experimenting. How should I apply these concepts to teaching my students about how physics should impact their treatment of everyone on Earth? Am I having the interact and explore how to me more just members of the world with their knowledge? I hope so.

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Student as Contributor: The Digital Learning Farm

2010-03-15T09:36:00.001-04:00

Title

Student as Contributor: The Digital Learning Farm

Alternate Title

I am sweet, why hasn't the world listened to me?

Presenter

Alan November, Senior Partner, November Learning

Notes

"The real revolution is information and relationships."

"We are techno lusting nerds."

If feed back on homework is not immediate then the mistakes made start to sink in and become part of the brain pathways. By 36 hours without feedback ideas are set and the homework has done more harm than good.

"All learning is social."

"Kids are more interested in listening to a child explaining something than a teacher."

'Every teacher is a learner and every learner is a teacher."

"Kids will work overtime if teacher invites them into the teaching and learning process."

"Why don't we bring kids to staff development?"

njfearless.ning.com

Reflection

I love Alan November's ideas. I was surprised to find out that most of the young teachers at the conference had not heard of him but felt like his message was old and tired. They said they had it all through their education classes. I was glad to hear this but also somewhat surprised, not all new teachers have caught the vision.

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Student Cell Phones in Learning ((tag:learning

2010-03-12T12:46:00.001-05:00

Title

Student Cell Phones in Learning

Alternate Title

Lot Of Interesting Things To Do With Cell Phones

Presenter

Liz Kolb, Lecturer, University of Michigan, and Adjunct Professor, Madonna University

Presentation

Notes

Liz thinks very creatively about how to use cell phones in learning. What I appreciate most about her is she think way outside the box on how to use tools, which I also like to do.

Jumbli.com - online word game. no control but could be a fun bell ringer.

contxt.com - online business cards. Could also be used to build scavenger hunts.

dailybooth.com - public place to send pictures to from cell phones, like a twitter for cell phone cameras.

It is time for me to figure out google voice.

She showed off scvngr.com which I love but is a big deal to get ready.

Reflection

Liz was off her game today.

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Getting Teachers to Adopt Technology: What to and not to Do

2010-03-12T09:36:00.001-05:00

Title

Getting Teachers to Adopt Technology: What to and not to Do

Alternate Title

This guys get it.

Presenter

Rushton Hurley, Executive Director, Next Vista for Learning, and Teacher, Santa Clara Unified School District, CA

Presentation

http://sites.google.com/site/rushtonsmacul2010sessions/home/getting-teachers-to-adopt-technology

Notes

Two things technology must do for him to use it

Save him time.
Teach kids better.

Six Don'ts and Dos

Don't require teachers to be experts in technology. Do remind them of their expertise.
Don't tie everything to standards. Do show them something fun.
Don't sit everyone in a lab for training. Do allow for regular and short sharing time.
Don't limit technology to labs. Do showcase what can be done outside the lab. This ones is a little less important int our 1 to 1 environment.
Don't buy expensive software a teacher has not used. Do learn what is freely available.
Don't blanket the school with expensive hardware. Do use targeted spending to focus purchases. No matter what you do you are going to tick someone off. Do not shoot for equity shoot for putting stuff in rooms where it will get used. If the people who do not get the technology a mad and they do something about it, great. If they are mad and they don't change give more stuff to the people do stuff. If you flip this around the people who get mad are the people doing stuff, and you want to encourage them not discourage them.

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Storytelling for the YouTube Generation

2010-03-11T17:26:00.001-05:00

Title

Storytelling for the YouTube Generation

Presenter

Steve Dembo, Online Community Manager, Discovery Educator Network, Discovery Education

Alternate Title

Kids tell stories in thousands of new and different ways, let them!

Presentation

http://prezi.com/7ayh86rap8_j/storytelling-for-the-youtube-generation/

Notes

"I do not give assignments, I give creative briefs."

You can make interactive choose your own adventure videos on YouTube.

Reflection

Step 1: Watch all the videos linked in the presentation in class.

Step 2: Give kids a topic.

Step 3: Give kids a due date.

Step 4: Watch awesome material on your topic.

Seems simple doesn't it?

Steve's main point: let your learners have the freedom to create. They will. And they will get better if you keep letting them.

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My laptop has a webcam, now what?

2010-03-11T17:25:00.001-05:00

Title

My laptop has a webcam, now what?

Actual Title

So many teachers and student use these things around here, I wonder if other people need to know the power?

It was the catchiest title I could come up with and I am working on a theory that catchy titles are the key to presenting.

Presenter

Me.

Presentation

See attached photos of slides. They will not be of much value since they each need the story and the slides do not have video. Sorry no audio. I wish I had the ability to remember to record myself at these things.

Reflection

I love presenting. It forces me to reflect on my teaching and tech coordinating and bring out in front of people what good is happening around me. I tried out two specific new things this year that I think may have helped.

First, I spent a lot of time on my title. It may not seem like it but I did. The title above is the best I have ever had. I liked that it was current: many PC people are new to having a webcam. I liked that there was no mistaking what the presentation was going to be about. I thought it communicated that there would be stuff in here to try out on Monday (a way teachers often decide what to do at conferences) while I knew I would get at picture theories of education during the whole thing. I wanted more than my current average at MACUL of 15 people in the room.

Second, I think I realized that there are three tiers of presenting at conferences. First tier is the true story tellers with a big philosophical point. Dan Meyer, Alan November, Will Richardson, David Warlick, Gary Stager all weave stories and presentations to make you think big thoughts. Second tier presenters show you a lot of things that you can do and try to weaver their big picture stuff into that. I think this is second tier because I might only get a few nuggets out and I will probably have to find them myself a little. Plus it is easier to make these presentations. Line up 25 good ideas and go. There is another tier but I would like to stay positive.

If you look at the slides, my presentation was essentially 21 good ideas about using webcams. I weaved through that some good rules of teaching, and how to use other devices than webcams that you may have around to achieve some of the same goals. I was really happy with how it came together.

I think my title worked. I had about 50 or 75 people at the presentation. The room was pretty big, so it was not full, but close. Aside from my title I was in the room that on the program had me right below all the headliners. That probably helped. The room I was in was literally the farthest room from anything, which might have hurt. I was very happy with the turnout. And I think no one left, which is another good sign for my title. I got a lot of positive feedback from the people who stayed after as well.

I could do some things better.

I need to put my slides up before the show so that my sharetabs.com link includes a link to the slides.
I need to make my sharetabs.com before the morning of the event.
I need to be ready to present 20 minutes early so I can greet them at the the door. By ten minutes left when I was ready to meet people at the door the room was half full. By the way, greeting people at the door is an essential and under utilized presentation technique.
I should consider the whole presentation being websites, although with all the videos that are of unknown copy write status, I really could not.

Overall I was really happy. The audience really tracked and seemed to enjoy it. I was very comfortable. I am glad MACUL sees fit to continue to allow me to present. Now I just have to think of a topic.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Cache the Excitement!

2010-03-11T15:27:00.001-05:00

Title

Cache the Excitement!

Alternate Title

I use my passion to be a better teacher.

Presenter

Cheryl Lykowski, Teacher, Bedford Public Schools

Reflections

She was great. She loved to geochache and has developed several lessons for kids to use geocaching. I love it when teachers bring what they love into the classroom. Her resources and a recommendation seemed to be well developed and thoughtful. May be environmental science will be experiencing this soon.

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Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter

2010-03-11T14:50:00.001-05:00

Title

Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter

Alternate Title

I did not get it at first but now I love it.

Highlights

Leslie Fisher is always informative and interesting.

Her rule for what to twitter 1/3 humor, 1/3 informative and 1/3 miscellaneous. I wonder what rule is for me?

She recommends three twitter accounts for educators: personal, professional and classroom or backchannel.

To embed or do other fun things go to twitter.com/goodies and look at what is available.

Definitive twitter resources twitter.pbworks.com
Thoughts

I would have talked about http://www.readtwit.com/ which brings twitter links into Google Reader.

I was in the same boat as her. I am starting to get it. It is powerful when people show it off because they have a ton of followers, If you do not have a ton of followers there is less immediate power. However, I have found great reading material from people that I follow. And that I think is the selling point. It is almost really easy RSS. You can see quick takes on the articles (and links) that are shaping the opinion of people you follow.

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Think like a statistician – without the math | FlowingData

2010-03-05T10:38:00.001-05:00

Finally, and this is the most important thing I've learned, always ask why. When you see a blip in a graph, you should wonder why it's there. If you find some correlation, you should think about whether or not it makes any sense. If it does make sense, then cool, but if not, dig deeper. Numbers are great, but you have to remember that when humans are involved, errors are always a possibility.

via flowingdata.com

Asking questions, learning, inspiration, creativity, how are they different? Can we have any without the other?

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Inspiration or Learning?

2010-03-04T12:47:00.001-05:00

Today in Environmental Science class a student was back after a trip to Chicago with the AP Art class. I asked her what she had learned, and she said, "nothing." I was a little taken aback and asked had she been inspired. She described some wonderful art that had inspired her. I asked her if there was a difference between learning and inspiration. A wonderful conversation ensued about creativity and learning and inspiration and what makes us be a part of advancing the topics that interest us. I learned this: for juniors and seniors, at least the ones in front of me this morning, their definition of learning was very different from mine. I would not want to learn if learning meant what they thought it did.

I think that truly learning something, something that makes you think a new thought, see the world from a new perspective, ask a new question, explore a new technique, express who you are better to those around you is inspiration.

What do you think? Are inspiration and learning the same thing? What do we do so that our students see learning as something as important as inspiration? What have you inspired in your learners recently?

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Segment Four Reflection

2010-03-01T20:23:00.001-05:00

Henry Giroux, Education Incorporated?
I think there is one largely overlooked piece that corporate America underestimated on its way to dominate schools: that information finds a way. Open source brings the power of the crowds to bear against the power of many corporate interests. The wikipedia, moodle, blogs, and RSS stand as a bastion of freedom against product placement, textbook publishers and those who would control our kids and their education for their profit.

Competitiveness rather than community; commodification of knowledge rather than coherence and creative synthesis: these are fruit of an evil spirit. In what concrete ways might your school demonstrate, in the “nuts and bolts” of the teaching-learning process, fruit that grows on the tree of the Holy Spirit?
I think my school has done a ton to emphasis community. The next thing that they could attack to reducecompetition is change how we sasign grades. This needs to be based less on two things: work done and big stakes tests. It needs to be based more on what student understand. In our school one of the ways we are moving towards this is with one to one laptop program. It allows you see deeper into what kids are thinking and their participation in what happens. It allows you to work together and evaluate individually.

Jean Anyon, The economic is political.
Poverty is real in America. For many years I have attended a church with great economic diversity. I quickly learned that no one works harder than the poor in America. Often with two jobs per adult (if there are two adults) and childcare and other pressures there is little time or money for involvement in any community. I remember once sitting in a council meeting discussing how the church council did not represent all incomes in the church. Later that night I was tired, I had worked 10 hours at school that day and the council meeting was going on into its fourth hour. As we discussed nominations for council time after time people who worked two jobs were taking their names out of the running. They could not meet in the evenings, they worked. I wondered to myself if I had put 80 hours in at a manual labor minimum wage job if I would even want to be at a 4 hour deliberative council meeting. My answer was obvious. I work a 56 hour a week classroom and desk job. I could not handle 4 hours.

Education is a piece of the answer. Being deliberative and discerning are skills that we should teach. I worry though that the skills that need to be taught are exactly the skills that politics is demanding we not teach. Politicians rarely want thinking voters. That is why the push for standards that teach facts and algorithms instead of thought and discernment. Being thoughtful about time and money are things that can reduce dependence on two jobs.

Are these concerns too political for schools to address? Or is it also to take a political stance to refuse to address them?
Yes to both. Sitting pat is a political skill and tactic that is used incredibly effectively in America. Earlier we read an article that showed us that you cannot teach without values. This truth lead us to know that you cannot teach without a political value coming through. I think this has a ton to do with the push for standards. No one want to loose the battle for the perspective that things are taught from. Unfortunately we then land on our students only getting the least common most agreeable facts. This is politically expedient because it leads to non-understanders, who vote the way the best media tells them too.

Must matters of social justice await consideration until the later levels of schooling, because they require developed cognitive capacities? Or, touching affective, evaluative, and discerning capabilities, should they be addressed at all levels, by seeking to inculcate tendencies, habits, dispositions, or virtues that are life-enhancing?
I think that all issues should be address at all levels. I think that as long as you interesct with the subject at all you will be developing a sense of the justice issue. Take you five year olds to the mission. Allow your students to hear from other cultures and continents. That alone will expose students to the learning about justice that you want.

Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed, 180-200.
Yes.

“Knowing the world in love is the only viable alternative to a knowing aimed at objective mastery. But such knowing is never divorced from doing” (p. 196). What are the implications of such an “epistemology of love” for curriculum, instruction, assessment, etc?
There are two parts that work in contrast to each other. How we treat others and how we are treated. Right now in schools we need to treat our students right. This is doubly difficult because society as represented by our politicians is trying it hardest to destroy schooling. By destroy I mean make it as cheap and generic and ineffective as possible.

“Biblical wisdom is the tracing of the divine wisdom of creation. Such wisdom—such an understanding of things in their interrelatedness—is in short supply in [our] fragmented culture….” (p. 198). How may your curriculum be structured so as to better reflect this interrelatedness?
We have to go beyond the basics and look at much more and look at it from every perspective in the room. No options, even if it seems ineffective or ridiculous.

Jeannie Oakes & Martin Lipton, Policy and law, 429-457.
What is the impact in your own school setting of the spirits and forces Oakes and Lipton discuss?
We feel pressure from ACT, SAT and AP more than NCLB. However it rarely drives our curriculum. Our students can get through the Michigan standards pretty quickly and move on to the real stuff of teaching and learning.

Whether or not Kimberly Min’s third grade students knew what her question about “science” meant, her claim that “an inclusive curriculum” is a social justice issue deserves consideration. (In a Christian school, this extends to the question of how one includes a Christian perspective in a skewed or crowded curriculum; for a Christian teacher in any setting, it is the question of how one respects the interrelatedness of creation that displays God’s wisdom.) Taking your cue from her example, what are some steps you have taken and could take to make your curriculum more inclusive?
I have been adding a lot of talk of energy on the grand scale into physics as we talk about it on the micro level in the book. I am not sure that this matches the genius of Ms. Min. I am also always seeking to mkae students more aware of the digital literacy that they need to be aware of as we use online resources and engagement.

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Segment Three Reflection

2010-02-20T15:28:00.001-05:00

Segment Three Reflection

Nicholas Wolterstorff, The world for which we educate.
I really like this statement, "Christian education is to equip and energize our students for a certain way of being in the world, not just a way of thinking... not one of your standard American ways of being."

In what ways might giving students access to a range of symbol systems or literacies also be thought of as attuning them to and empowering them for the demands of justice?
I think that anything we do to help our students see the world from another perspective is excellent teaching.

Edmund W. Gordon with Carol Bonilla-Bowman, Equity and social justice in educational achievement.
I wonder this in the context of 2010: are we undermining even the modest goals of becoming middle class by our societal trend of degrading the achievements of the middle class? What good is schooling to a student if it leads to jobs that the politicians accuse of being filled with lazy and overpaid people? In my context this is less of a problem because there is an appeal to Christ who expects us each to draw nearer to Him and not avoid improving as we do that.

John Rawls. Rawls’ theory is founded on two principles. The first states that,

Each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all”

the second holds that:

social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they both (a) are to the greatest benefit to the least advantaged, consistent with the just savings principle, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality and opportunity.

How well do you think Rawls’ view comports with a biblical perspective on justice?

I think that it gets close. I think that the only part missing is some individual choice. I think that one of the hardest things for Christians to deal with is that Jesus loves everyone. Jesus gives his love to people who will spend their whole lives in luxury and to those who will live on less than a dollar a day. This often does not seem fair to either group, nor any of the groups in between. So I think that part (a) stick out as a non-equality. Everyone, no matter their position, deserves the best education.

What difference should the biblical concept of “will” make to the goals and practices of a Christian teacher?

I think it allows us to understand that each student make s a choice to follow us or not. Since we know this is part of who they are we can and should prepare for it and not be surprised by it.

What opportunities and constraints do you see in your own environment in terms of meeting these goals?
I do not think that the tests can measure what we are teaching anymore. Our goals go so far into creativity and discernment and other muddy messy areas where there is no right answer but discussion and thoughtful response. I think this is the real tragedy of the tests, they do not measure anything important.

David Tyack & Larry Cuban, Policy cycles and institutional trends. In Tinkering to Utopia, 40-59
Schools will never arrive because before some schools have ever gotten the memo about reform others are out front doing the next thing. A second problem for schools is that they are one of the main drivers of society and culture. There will always be a fight over their control and direction because of this. That means that as the political wind blows so will the goals of schooling, making for new target all the time.

Brian Walsh & Sylvia Keesmaat, Colossians Remixed: Subverting the Empire, 216-219.
"And if their imagination is shaped by the life of that community, its literature, poetry, music and art -- and most foundationally, its subversive narrative of a kingdom that turns the value of the empire on their heads -- then that liberated imagination will, we pray, engender a liberated child." (page 217).

You are all teachers. How would you answer the question of why you are “playing the educational game of schooling?”
I teach to bring the type of education engender in the quote above to the learners around me each day. This type of education is offered nearly nowhere else. It is an education I cannot offer to my children in every area, so I call on other teachers, in a school with those goals, to influence my children in areas outside my expertise. I call on them as well because they beautifully grow the community my children grow up in.

In their conclusion, Walsh and Keesmaat acknowledge that schooling will continue; what in their critique of current practice and their convictions about the proper goals of education can you take on board in your own professional setting? What would you reject?
I take the goal of making kingdom builders and creative thinkers. I take the goal of guiding creativity instead of producing workers. I love what they had to say beyond this: there is a point at which I cannot do all this myself because I simply do not know enough. My children will have to hear this from others who are trying to make them into the creative people God would have them be.

Eric Schaps, Victor Battistich, & Daniel Solomon, Community in school as key to student growth: Findings from the Child Development Project. Articulate the philosophical commitments underlying the project, summarize the research findings, and reflect on the implications for your own school setting. Consider in particular the significance of academic achievement as a measure of success in the context of other goals that schools should have as prime socializing institutions.
The underlying philosophies of community education emphasized in this article are:

Respectful, supportive relationships among students, teachers,and parents.
Frequent opportunities to help and collaborate with others.
Frequent opportunities for autonomy and influence.
Emphasis on common purposes and ideals.

They obviously consider academic achievement important but it is not fundamental to what they are doing. They think that if you teach content in the context of these philosophies then the content will be learned better and students will achieve other more lasting benefits from the education. They also backed this up with research and following students for many years afterwards. I think ideas one and four are essential for a Christian school, in fact I am not sure you can have one without those benefits. In the end each Christian school should at some level have Jesus and a common ideal. Any school that is chosen by parents and teachers (and in most cases sacrificed for) will have a good shot at good relationship between these elements. Two and three are much less common, but are an endeared species other places in education. These are choices that a school has to make. In our school we have a one to one laptop program because of the ability to collaborate and individually and creatively respond to learning.

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Segment Two Reflections

2010-02-12T21:30:00.001-05:00

Segment Two Reflections

Can faith in education literally, and not merely figuratively, be considered an idol? (And could it become an idol even in the Christian school?)

I think the question was answered before it was asked with the great phrase, "where there is not faith in God, a substitute will be found." I think it is the nature of life to have fundamental beliefs. Many educators of many faith backgrounds feel called to the profession. If you are not grounded in one faith you will find another, an idol, to replace what God would have you believe.

Stanley Hauerwas, Pro Ecclesia, Pro Texana: Schooling the heart in the heart of Texas. As you read, think about how his general claims about American society and the church’s relation to it, as well as his specific claims about the goals and shape of the university curriculum, might apply in your own school situation.
Hauerwas sets up the conundrum that all Christians face. How do each of us use the gifts and talents given to us by God in gratitude for what God has done? He gives an answer in the context of Butler, and in general which is: stand for something. I think we should stand for something. I also think that humans are each given vastly different talents and gifts. Two Christians might stand for very different ideas. I think we have to become more comfortable with the irresolution of this problem, not less. Our personal rootedness in Christ will produce the fruit that God's Kingdom needs near us.

With an expansive view of “moral” in mind (as the ethical environment in its multi-dimensionality), what would you say are some of the moral issues raised by the structure of schooling, with respect to the general patterns in your society, and its specific form in your own local setting? Are “disciplinary divisions” that promote fragmentation a problem at your level of schooling?
I think in America today the number one moral issue raised by the structure of schooling is access. We are not providing the best education to the most kids. In fact for most we are providing only a basic education based on increasingly watered down national standards. On top of that, the more likely you are to need a great education the less likely you are to get it.

As you read, reflect on what other societal forces are at work, along with the demands of capitalism, to subvert the commitment to equality. And, besides equality, to what other goals might (public) schools be seen to be – and ought they to be – oriented? David Tyack & Larry Cuban, Progress or regress? Tinkering to Utopia, pp. 12-39.
I think that they are quite fair if not erring a little on the harsh side in their assessment of public education. We have asked the public schools to do amazing things that we have asked of almost no other institution. Integration, parenting, test scores, citizens and job preparation all with little or no increase in funding. It is a wonder anything get done, let alone well.

In your professional context, do you have evidence to support Tyack and Cuban’s claim? Based on your experience and reading, what are some of the larger societal forces at work to militate against reform?
I think people are trusting their local schools less and less. The message we hear so often that education is so broken is hard to not apply locally. I my specific case I think the opposite true. I feel support from everyone, especially those who take the time to come in and see what is happening rather than rely purely on what they hear in the community and from their students. I think change needs to happen locally, but that the purse strings are moving further away from local, making change harder.

People seem to be less and less willing to pay for things that do not directly benefit them. This may just be a symptom of the economy, but I think it is a bigger issue. Of course this makes public education a hard sell because fully two thirds of tax payers do not get a direct benefit from it (people who do not have children, people whose children are out of the system, and those who opt out of the system).

“Many policymakers have narrowed the currency of educational success to one main measure – test scores – and reduced schooling to a means of economic competitiveness both personal and national” (p. 34). If this is as true today (!) as it was in 1995, what steps can be taken at the local level to combat this trend?
Test scores are even more important today. Because the standards are forever getting weaker as they nationalize the tests are also getting easier (no one tell the politicians). I think the solution is this simple. We know there is a better way to teach than to a test. We know that kids taught the better way will do fine on the tests. Believe this. Change and prove that it is true. Another part of this is that every politician who votes for a test needs to take the test the same day as the kids and post results of the test on the web.

Tyack and Cuban believe it is evident “that the public schools need to do a better job of teaching students to think, not just in order to (supposedly) rescue an ailing economy but to serve broad civic purposes as well” (p. 38). Why, or why not, should “teaching students to think” be central to the mission of schools?
It should be as long as schools are teaching them to use the thinking skill they have been gifted to them by God.

Terence J. Lovat & Neville D. Clement, The pedagogical imperative of values education.
Values are fundamental to excellent teaching.

H. Svi Shapiro, A parent’s dilemma: public vs. Jewish education.
I think his argument for Jewish education comes down to it having a much better chance than his local public school of creating in his daughter what values he would like to see. If I read it right this comes down to him believing that the public school is based in materialism and individualism and that does not mesh with his view of the world where he would like his daughter be concerned with the dignity of others. This is the harsh critique of public school that he was trying to avoid. He is saying what we all know, school is based in values. Currently the most common denominator in America is material goods and looking out for yourself. If you want other values you have to seek out other than public schooling.

Your responses to Shapiro’s article may differ, perhaps depending on which kind of school you work in, among other factors. But this is also a “critical social issue”, for individual students, parents, and society as a whole. What arguments would you employ in support of public policies that would address this issue (which is obviously multi-faceted)?
I think I would change the values of public education by getting rid of all national standards, all standardized tests and only allowing college and universities to accept students on interview. All of this would serve the purpose of putting the focus back on giving students experiences that form each one into what God would have each be (or in secular terms finding each student's best talents and growing them). That in turn could not avoid in part their connectedness to each other, part of what it is to be human and what is robbed of us in making each child experience exactly the same thing and have the same goals.

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To Know As We Are Known Chapter 5-7 and The Having of Wonderful Ideas

2010-02-06T17:03:00.001-05:00

Learning Log 2

To Know As We Are Known, Chapter 5-7, Parker J. Palmer

The Having of Wonderful Ideas, Eleanor Duckworth

Summary

Any place where we are expecting people to learn must be safe for people to explore their ideas. The definition of safety is in each learners eyes. The environment encourages exploration and is the foundation for new ideas. When new ideas come up they are celebrated.

Important Ideas

Classrooms must be have the freedom to explore every inch of the subject they are assigned and nothing more.

Learners need to be free to embrace the truth that seeks them.

The truth that seeks them may come in ways that are unique to the learner, and the leader should be able to accept this.

Question

Is technology a hinderance or a help to creating the open spaces that students need to come up with wonderful ideas?

Palmer Quotes

Consensus is the practical process by which we practice obedience and truth. Pg 97

Avoid arguing for your own rankings. Pg 95

If we leave those emotions unattended, we will not be able to clear the space. Pg84

every stranger and every strange utterance is met with welcome. Pg 74

A learning space has three major characteristics, three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries, and an air of hospitality. Pg 71.

To “remember” means literally to re-member the body, to bring the separated parts of the community of truth back together, to reunite the whole. Pg 103

For our tenancy to blame institution for our problems is itself a symptom of our objectivism. Pg 107

But the original and authentic meaning of the word “professor” is “one who professes a faith.” pg 113

One discipline is the simple practice of studying in fields outside one's own. Pg 114

Duckworth Quotes

Intelligence cannot develop without matter to think about. Making new connections depends on knowing enough about something in the first place to provide a basis for thinking of other things to do – of other questions to ask – that demand more complex connections in order to make sense. Pg 14

Knowing enough about things is one prerequisite for wonderful ideas. Pg 14

Reflection

I have have always believed in having as much fun as I can withing the boundaries or rules placed around me. In my job as a director at a summer camp we tell our counselors this all the time. As much fun as you can inside the rules. This is not because we want them to push the lines but because we know that they can see the world in a very different way than we (older) people can. And kids will respond to that. They will love it and look up to it. Palmer I think asks us to create space like that. Spaces where you cannot climb trees, but you can do everything else imaginable with trees. Spaces where exploring is welcome and curiosity is encouraged. I loved the quote about every stranger and strange utterance being welcome. Can you imagine a church where this was true? Can you imagine was that would be like? Palmer points out that we need not fear such a situation, but how many people in Christian schools and churches everywhere are afraid of ideas? Afraid of entering into community with a subject matter, of opening themselves up to ideas of others and of the subject at hand. I am not sure how to bring this anywhere that it seems like it is important, but I know that I meet this most commonly in the communities of bloggers that I read. I think that many people are not using the internet in a way that build, but in searching you can find people who are. People who police their sites for garbage and rudeness. People that allow for good, divergent ideas but abhor mocking and ridicule and personal attacks. That is why I ask my question. At my school the mission is, “equipping minds and nurturing hearts to transform the world for Jesus Christ.” For us to do this we need to be the ones who are building places where truth and be explored and discovered, but the boundaries of love are placed all around the discussion. I cannot even imagine what that looks like at its fullest. But it is wonderful. And there are wonderful ideas (a phrase I loved) all around it floating out of every participant. It is a vision that I cannot get out of my head, better than Christmas morning.

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Session 1 Reflections

2010-02-06T16:40:00.001-05:00

The Biblical nature of humaness.

I think there are three fundamental pieces to humanness. All humans belong to God. All humans break God's heart each day. All humans are called to help each other through their brokenness. We are loved by God no matter what and because of that perfect model we help others see that.

Treating students justly.

Treating students justly involves knowing them for who they are. Treating them as equal viewpoints on the world while challenging them to learn more and perceive the world with new perspectives. The reason this is important is that students need very much to learn how to help others in their brokenness. Without that they will not be able to understand their relationship to God or the impact of God's Love on themselves. It gets harder to do this without their help as they develop their own understanding of the world. You need to rely on their willingness to engage you and subject matter. However, the alternative is that they do not engage you and the content matter and never learn at all, but rather are just in the presence of facts.

Reflections on Richard Pring, Education as a moral practice.

What a refreshing perspective on education. I see a lot of polarization in opinion today and education is no different. The camp in education seem to be back to the basics and let each child find her own way. This really sunk in when he said, "There is the “impersonal” level—the narratives within science or history or literature wherein ideas are preserved, developed, criticised within a public tradition. But there is the “personal” level at which young people try to make sense of the world and the relationships around them and at which they find, or do not find, valuable forms of life to which they can give allegiance. This personal narrative is where young people seek to understand who and what they are, partly, of course, in relation to other people and to the wider society." (page 112) There will be new stuff to learn. If a learners never applies that to her own unique perspective, then really nothing was learned. This speaks really strongly in favor of Christian education where we seek to gain knowledge for the sake of applying it in process of, "To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6:8) If that knowledge does not translate into better following Gods word, then it will fail you. "I wish to argue that what makes sense of the curriculum, in educational terms, is that it is the forum or the vehicle through which young people are enabled to explore seriously (in the light of evidence and argument) what it is to be human. Such an exploration has no end. That is why teaching should be regarded as a moral practice." (page 112)

Reflections on Bob Goudzwaard, Mark Vander Vennen & David Van Heemst, Widening ways of justice, economy, and peace.

I am not sure that this reading helped me to be more hopeful for education becoming more just. The needs in the third world as far as debt relief and development are great and the authors are hopeful that things will move, and they have a plan. I think they have an advantage on people who want to change education. Their advantage is that no one, no matter their polotics or religion, can look at poverty and think it is ok. In the United States there are many groups who have many thoughts about education, and many of these groups do not even see a problem. Just to name two powerful groups who see education as not having a problem: the educational industrial complex (publishers, textbook makers, unions, school architects, etc...) and the, "it was good enough for me it is good enough for my kids" parents. It is not even close to universally accepted that there is a justice issue, and until there is change is a much less possible.

Reflections on Padraig Hogan, Teaching and learning as a way of life.

I think that teaching is a way of life because I think it reflects one of the fundamental human characteristics. It seems to me that some vocations, ones that society in general holds in different esteem, directly reflect and tend to fundamental human characteristics. Farmers care for the earth, lawyers and accounts seek fairness, politicians seek community, doctors care for our bodies, and teachers tend to our nature to learn and explore. Hogan says, "the effort to experience teaching as a way of life means joining a recurrent if not continual struggle: a struggle between higher forms of human freedom and influences which continually threaten that freedom with overt or more subtle forms of captivity." (page 221) That is not much different than a farmer fighting weeds to grow food, a doctor fighting a cancer or a lawyer fighting for fairness.

Hogan is an Irish academic writing in the context of the British Isles. What evidence do you see in your own context for the ascendancy of performativity?

I see two main evidences of an increase in efficiency in the schools around me. Class sizes and teacher responsibilities have been going up steadily throughout my career. The idea that the same teacher can tend to more students in the same way is not logical yet is maintained by policy makers everywhere. Teachers used to be free to offer extras as they saw the need to meet student needs. Some minimum numbers of extras are now required. Second, our input into what and how we teach has been going steadily down. This is not true in my specific case where test score stay high no matter what and the state has less say in what happens. However it has made my teaching less rich because my colleagues who would have enriched my teaching are busy working towards really good test scores.

Hogan suggests that “the dispositions to action that characterise teaching as a way of life” – the “practical virtues” of teaching – include:

an alert appreciation that ‘real knowledge is the property of God’ and a corresponding consciousness of the inherent limitations of even the best of human enquiries; an acknowledgement of both the modesty and the ever-emergent prospects that befit learning as an unfinished and unfinishable undertaking; a realisation that the most promising and most defensible purposes of teaching are to be found in connection with this larger undertaking; the self-critical insight that teaching is itself a form of learning-anew with others, where the teacher acts as listener, questioner, instructor, guide and as a responsible and caring leader; the awareness that differences in capability, in aptitude and in sense of identity complicate but also enrich what is to be understood as equity and appropriateness in educational experience; an appreciation of the point that in a genuine community of learners a distinctive ethos arises in an unforced way; a critical awareness that knowledge as assertive mastery, or as individualist power, or as coercive prowess, works—behind the scenes as it were—to undermine such an ethos. (p. 221)

Would you take issue with Hogan’s admittedly partial list of the “practical virtues” of teaching? Are there other virtues you believe should have greater prominence than those he lists?

I like his list. Particularly powerful in my estimation is realizing that you are a co-learner with everyone else in the room, even when some institution has decided to call you a teacher. This leads me to add or emphasize this point: the relationship you build will change you as well. As you lead others to be richer people so will you become richer.

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Reflections

2010-02-06T16:38:00.001-05:00

This semester I am taking another course at Calvin College. Education 510 Advanced Foundations in Education is its name and it is online. As part of that I am required to think about certain topics or reading along the way. I am sharing them here. They will be posted under the tag reflection, as that is the professors word for the assignment, the tag learning as all of my learning is posted under this, and EDUC510 because there are three other assignments that will posted here as well. The professors question or prompts will be in italics, and my answers in regular text.

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What can you do with this?

2010-01-30T20:36:00.001-05:00

Dan is one of my favorite bloggers. He frequently does posts called WCYDWT. One of those goes with another blog I found, I think. What do you think?

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To Know As We Are Known: Chapters 1-4

2010-01-22T21:13:00.003-05:00

Learning Log 1

To Know As We Are Known: Chapters 1-4

Parker J. Palmer

Summary

Palmer is saying that education is about discovering the truth. Truth is only discovered through love. There must be equal parts love for the subject, yourself and others walking with you on the path of discovery. If you deny any one of these their role in the process you will not arrive at truth.

Important Ideas

Love is essential to knowing truth.
We the observer are essential to knowing truth.
Interacting with the subject is essential to knowing truth.
The idea of learning reflecting a monastic culture.

Question

How do we gather up the courage and support to teach in a way that build a community of learners in the face of high stakes tests, the tyranny of results right now and a world that is doing all it can to tear apart community?

Quotes

But what scholars now say -- and what good teachers have always known -- is the real learning does not happen until students are brought into relationship with the teacher, with each other, and with the subject. pg xvi
The deepest wellspring of our desire to know is the passion to recreate the organic community in which the world was first created. pg 8
A knowledge that springs from love may require us to change, even sacrifice, for the sake of what we know. It is easy to be curious and controlling. It is difficult to love. pg 9
Truthful knowing weds the knower and the known; even in separation, the two become part of each other's life and fate. pg 31
Reality's ultimate structure is that of an organic, interrelated, mutually responsive community of being. pg 53

Reflection

I have said before in the is that I love Parker Palmer and this book. What I loved most about it was that is so well described what I felt like I was doing at camp when I was younger and counseling kids. Bringing them all around the woods with no particular agenda other than to look at what God had given us. It was wonderful and still to this day I love bringing cabins around (I am a director in the summer). I love teaching counselors how to live in the world that brings kids to God's love and God's kingdom. He gave me the strength to say that this was how to teach as well and I like to think I have not turned back. Giving in to the pressures that would make us just teach the facts is really easy. It is also something that keeps your job safe. I have never seen someone questioned who was telling kids the way it is. That is not the way I want to do it though. I want them to see it and live it and experience it. I want them to know each other and getting them to care about what is going on in each others lives because they will learn physics better does not fly with most kids in a highly motivated school. There is not any doubt in my mind about its effectiveness, except while I am doing it. There is so little in immediate results and it seems like you are never going to get anywhere. It seems like you are stalled because something important has not been achieved. But then there is a day when the right mood and the right questions and the right time all intersect. Those time can only happen when you are constantly looking for them, but when they do happen you learn more in one day than some people do in a semester. You know what has happened and how the community of the learners (yourself included) have been ushered into a new relationship with the subject. I love the vision be being wed to the subject. It totally describes what I am after. When a kids asks about the physics of something that happened at home or on the football field or the golf course. Then you have them. When you get a text message in the middle of the summer with a question or just a comment. They are in relationship with the subject.

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Learning Logs

2010-01-22T21:13:00.001-05:00

You will start to see learning logs here. I took a class this past semester and these were the assignments every week. I am cleaning them up a little and putting them out there for comment, input, and because I am surprised at how many people were interested in my pedagogical autobiography. I got several personal emails along with comments on the entries. Thanks for your interest and I hope you learn something for these observations. One of the real strengths of my class was the reading material. There were a lot of pages of reading, but it was great stuff. Here is the format you will see in each log.

Summary

A couple of sentances sumarizing your view of the work.

Important Ideas

several simple statements getting at the important ideas of the text.

Question

Our big question that we would like to discuss with the author if we had the chance.

Quotes

Our favorite quotes from the book or article.

Reflection

Ten minutes of free flowing thought trying to imagine the conversation surrounding the question you would ask the author. I admit I am cleaning this up a little for the web. Our professor was fine with misspellings and bad grammar. She wanted raw thought. Frequently that is what you get from me, but I might run the spell check.

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Standards ((learning,standards))

2010-01-12T13:57:00.001-05:00

I read two articles in the last 24 hours taking very strong stand against national education standards. What make them interesting is that they offer essentially the same argument from wildly different world views. I love the common argument.

Both argue that a child is a unique individual, and that standards, national standards no less, will make for almost no chance that a child's truth discovery in life will intersect at all with what they do in school. This will be a colossal waste of their time and our money as a society. No less my time as an educator.

I spent a lifetime hearing Proverbs 22:6, "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." and thinking I and my parents knew where God wanted me to go. It wan not until my faith matured that I realized that God had a plan for me. Training a child has little to do with where I think the child should go. It has everything to do with what God has built for that child to do. My job as an physics teacher is to put as much physics stuff around the learners so that the parts of each student that need to know physics interact with the truth of physics. That way God will reveal the way each learner in the class (including me) should go.

From a Christian perspective, God tells us that we are each unique and have a gift to use in the Kingdom of God. That Kingdom is now and real. Standards reduce the chance that a learner will interact with a subject on any level but fact. From a humanistic perspective truth is built and sought by the learner. Standards eliminate any possibility that learners will find anything but the most watered down trivialized truths of the subject that has been standardized. This does not bring out their passions, turns them off to school (and may be learning along with it) and does not make them who they are suposed to be.

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Father Joe

2010-01-04T08:18:00.001-05:00

Download now or preview on posterous

FatherJoeNotesFromArt.pdf (256 KB)

Here is a link to a (poor) audio recording of a speech by Father Joe on his nine rules for teaching. I have also included Art's notes. Both the speech and the notes are excellent reminders of why we teach.

http://ceateachers.org/node/200

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Acorns

2009-12-23T09:03:00.001-05:00

Yesterday Lydia truly helped with the food preparation. Today we are having people over celebrating the finalization of Asha'a adoption. After grandma melted the white chocolate in a double boiler Lydia and grandpa would dip grapes in the chocolate and then the chocolate into some chopped peanuts. This makes little edible acorns. Yummy and fun. I am not sure how that chocolate got around Lydia's mouth.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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This Is The Day

2009-12-23T08:42:00.001-05:00

I led this chapel, "This Is The Day" on December 7, 2009 at HCHS. The insight into the passage and the repeat after me format is a complete rip off from a friend who spoke this summer at Camp Roger. The words are from my students, anonymously. I chickened out in front of the audience and said purity instead of virginity.

Psalm 118 (NIV)

1 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
his love endures forever.

2 Let Israel say:
"His love endures forever."

3 Let the house of Aaron say:
"His love endures forever."

4 Let those who fear the LORD say:
"His love endures forever."

5 In my anguish I cried to the LORD,
and he answered by setting me free.

6 The LORD is with me; I will not be afraid.
What can man do to me?

7 The LORD is with me; he is my helper.
I will look in triumph on my enemies.

8 It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in man.

9 It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in princes.

10 All the nations surrounded me,
but in the name of the LORD I cut them off.

11 They surrounded me on every side,
but in the name of the LORD I cut them off.

12 They swarmed around me like bees,
but they died out as quickly as burning thorns;
in the name of the LORD I cut them off.

13 I was pushed back and about to fall,
but the LORD helped me.

14 The LORD is my strength and my song;
he has become my salvation.

15 Shouts of joy and victory
resound in the tents of the righteous:
"The LORD's right hand has done mighty things!

16 The LORD's right hand is lifted high;
the LORD's right hand has done mighty things!"

17 I will not die but live,
and will proclaim what the LORD has done.

18 The LORD has chastened me severely,
but he has not given me over to death.

19 Open for me the gates of righteousness;
I will enter and give thanks to the LORD.

20 This is the gate of the LORD
through which the righteous may enter.

21 I will give you thanks, for you answered me;
you have become my salvation.

22 The stone the builders rejected
has become the capstone;

23 the LORD has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes.

24 This is the day the LORD has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.

25 O LORD, save us;
O LORD, grant us success.

26 Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD.
From the house of the LORD we bless you.

27 The LORD is God,
   and he has made his light shine upon us.
   With boughs in hand, join in the festal procession
   up to the horns of the altar.

28 You are my God, and I will give you thanks;
you are my God, and I will exalt you.

29 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
his love endures forever.

Repeat After Me

I need your help with chapel today. I need you all to finish this line when I start it.

Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.
[practice until they get it right]

The Good

You have probably heard this phrase a hundreds times. On Sunday in church, in chapel right here. In class or devotions somewhere. I am sure that many of us sang the song in battle of who could be louder with the other half of the room in Sunday school. And sometimes it is so easy to say:
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Just being able to be with friends- they can turn my whole day around and make it so much better- they can make me laugh at anytime.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

The day when we were at regional for MIFA One-Act and they announced that Holland Christian had won the competition. All of the excitement and tears of joy we all shared is something that will bring me joy for my entire life. When I see others around me succeed in theater. We work together and perform together as a family - it's an irreplaceable blessing in my life.

Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

When I actually got an A- on a math test. That was one of the best days of my life.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Giving money to the Children of Hope and watching the Children's Choir come to our school to sing.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Teachers understanding and flexibility. Seriously.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

When I just figured out that Christmas break is 2 weeks long this year and that I graduate in May and then am forever done with high school... awesome!!
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Being on the Podium at the state meet for swimming.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

The day that my now best friend invited me to sit with them at lunch. Those moments have brought me happiness and have helped me through many times. Without them the friendship and who I am today may not be here.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

The tug of war battle over the mud pit (biology pond) my freshman year.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Someone put this in the wrong place in the form. CAPA.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

These are actual quotes from actual students. I did not make them up, I had them submit them in a Google Form. I would suggest that we are in the season that this phrase was made for. God humbled himself to be a human child and we wait in expectation of the day of his arrival.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

The Bad

But then this summer a friend pointed out the rest of the Psalm to me. Listen to some of these verses.

5 In my anguish I cried to the LORD,
10 All the nations surrounded me,
13 I was pushed back and about to fall,

Anguished, surrounded, pushed back, about to fall. None of that sounds good. Some days it is practically impossible to say:
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Watching my friends say snide comments behind each others backs.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

When some of my friends were chosen to be part of a team, but I wasn't- at times you can feel very excluded.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

When my boyfriend broke up with me.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

In my sophomore year I experienced three different and very significant deaths... the worst for me was my grandfather, he was an amazing man and the best grandpa. I will forever miss him... and the tragedies that happened in my sophomore year will always be in my mind.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

People lying to me. It is easy to find out that they lie....
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Having to find where you fit in. It is a really hard process.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

My grandpa is getting older, and we are really starting to be able to see the effects of his age. It's hard to watch.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Injustice from friends or teachers.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Watching my parents relationship fall apart.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

When my Dad died.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Hearing that one of my classmates has never had a birthday cake before. I had never thought about being thankful for cake before.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Personal Responsibility

Listen to one more verse.
18 The LORD has chastened me severely,
but he has not given me over to death.

Its even worse! Some of the pain in life we created and need to be corrected. Ouch. The only thing good about the situation is that God did not take our life. Some days it feels like we do not even deserve to say:
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Bad grades.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Getting in a car accident and having to tell your mom (you are screwed).
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Fights with friends.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Losing my virginity.
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

How Can We Keep Saying This?

Twenty years ago this Christmas week my Grandpa died. Two weeks ago Saturday Bob died. Bob was a good friend, the first time I have lost a good friend to death. In the 20 years between those deaths I have made decisions plenty of times and been thrust into plenty of other situations where it felt impossible to say:
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

But 2000 years ago Jesus said
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

and because of his life and love for me I can muster the strength and courage each day to say
Me: This is the day the LORD has made
You: let us rejoice and be glad in it.

Let's Pray

Blessed are we who come in the name of the LORD.
From this house of the LORD we bless you.

You, LORD are God,
   and you have made your light shine upon us.
   With boughs in hand, we join in the festal procession
   up to the horns of the altar.

You are our God, and we will give you thanks;
you are our God, and we will exalt you.

We Give thanks to you LORD, for you are good;
and your love endures forever.

Posted via email from Jim's posterous

Pedagogical Autobiography: Future Questions

2009-12-15T22:02:00.003-05:00

As I think about the course that I have just taken and the impact on my classroom I have had a number of questions come to mind about my own practice. The process of moving through the autobiography has also inspired a lot of questions about what I do to help and hurt my students progress towards who God wants them to be. In no particular order here are my questions.

How can I better integrate faith into learning? In an excellent blog post Dan Beerens lists 9 qualities of discipleship. As I looked at this list several of them are sorely missing from my physics classroom. My goal for the year is to integrate at least once each of these into what I am learning with my students. This has proven to be a much harder goal than I thought. This also means that there is a lot left to my work on integrating faith into what I learn. It inspires great questions like: How do I worship in science class? What idolatry will you find as a scientist? How can science build community, or where can we keep it from breaking down community? How can we use science to bring joy and heal brokenness? Palmer says, "Transformed by love we use our minds to recall and recreate the community in which we were created, to know the world in the same spirit in which we are known." (page 16) Becoming through physics class and through better teaching disciples of Christ will certainly move us to know more about who made us, and everything that Gods made for us.

How does a technology rich environment fit with and change learning? This question is always on my mind as I learn in my own classroom, but also as I am called from time to time to lead the learning of the faculty on the same topic. We all, students and teachers a like, have laptops at my school. How does that change what I do? What needs to be gotten rid of and what needs to be enhanced? Palmer says, "truth seeks us as well." (pg 72) Laptops make this happen at a pace that makes the truth of this statement obvious. How to I harness that power. The laptops also allow us to explore to every end the wonderful ideas that Duckworth speaks of. They are a limitless tool in my limited hands.

What is a physics teacher's response to wolframalpha? It essentially eliminates the need for all math issues in my class, and If I can get the students to use it changes fundamentally what physics I can teach. What physics should be taught if no math is required to know it? What problems can we solve when we do not need to know math but can apply math? How does the experience change? This may seem like a simple question but it is not even remotely easy. I feel like this is a physics teachers Gutenberg press. Using the ideas of Smith, how do I use this tool to, "help" students rather than "teach" students to join the physics club. Certainly some in this club would just outlaw this new tool. Others would embrace it to the disinterest of the problem solvers attracted to the field. How do I find the balance?

How can I be less helpful? Teachers are too often jumping in to help rather than stepping back to watch and learn what the learners are learning. I do this all the time. Sometimes the best thing is to wait, and I do not wait enough. I want to strive to never ask questions that I know the answer to ahead of time. In "On Listening to What the Children Say" Vivian Gussin Paley listened so well. I want to provide for myself that opportunity more often. How do I find the time and the patience to do that? I want to have the same look when a learner gets an answer right as wrong. I do not what to "fill[ed] in the blanks" myself. (page 360)

This is of course not all the questions, but the ones that have really driven my reflections this fall. I will try to keep updating as I figure out these and add so many more to the list.

Posted via email from Jim's posterous

Pedagogical Autobiography: Failure

2009-12-15T22:02:00.001-05:00

I try new things. My class is never the same year to year. That is not to say that students would not see pieces that they would recognize. My friend and the camp director that I worked for who was an assistant principal told me that the best thing he could have done for education was to throw out all the file cabinets. There are new kids in front of you each year. Listen to them and see where they need to go.

This means failure. I have to apologize and give credit for work that did not go the way I had planned. I have to ask kids to finish lessons and labs that are not meeting my goals, simply to see how badly they end so that I know all the improvements that need to be made. I say the wrong thing when answering questions. I make mistakes.

Luckily for me science is all about making mistakes. And so is good teaching.

It is hard to imagine that failure should be a part of what and how we teach. And I am not just saying this in the sort of pithy way that entrepreneurs who have millions of dollars in the bank fail at new ventures, but still have millions of dollars in the bank. Failing at things means three things. You are comfortable with the people and place that you are with. You are reflective about what you have done. You are trying something that you did not know how to do before.

Because I am willing to try new things I think my students are as well. It welcomes them to the club of science where we try things, and sometimes they work and sometimes they do not. By club I mean Frank Smith's idea of club, "all the different groups with which we identify ourselves." (page 10) School as we know it in America does not tolerate failure. Students are in a constant fight with each other for position in class ranking, GPA, grades and test scores. They know that what helps the others in their classes might not help them. To get them to then be willing to try something that they might not suceed at will only happen if they feel like they can recover from what went wrong. I hopefully allow all of this to work together to bring them to a place where trying and failing is comfortable.

The second thing you need to be to fail well is to be reflective. I will often have students who do not know why they have failed. This is not an easy thing to figure out usually. You need to be reflective to understand your short comings. Again I think a certain amount of modeling this helps. I can model it both in an experimental way, by looking closely the work they do and reflecting on it with them. I also model it, without trying to, by showing how I recover from my educational experiments. Each of these offers insight to the learners of how the larger wold works.

Finally, I want my student to try new things that they would not have tried outside of me challenging them to try them. This is a big deal because I like to include in that list ways of looking at school, learning and the world. I want them to think big thoughts about how to solve the problems in front of the in their own unique ways. This takes time, as in real class time, and attention to what is happening. It also takes some tolerance for student who are not working while others are not even close to done. I am still unsure of what to do with these students.

Failing is a big part of trying new things and living in the world. Reacting to it in reflective positive ways is a life long lesson that I have learned as I watch my students do it. I am not naturally good at failing, not even remotely. They have taught me everything I know about it and I will be forever indebted to them for it.

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Pedagogical Autobiography: FruFra

2009-12-13T21:55:00.001-05:00

Download now or watch on posterous

FruFra EDUC520.m4v (21552 KB)

One day about 4 years into teaching I walked out of my room and into the math office, which was actually carved out of a corner of my room. The teacher working there turn to me and asked, what is this frufra stuff that you do? I looked at him funny and asked what we meant. What he meant is exemplified by the video that I attached here.

I did not at the time know the answer. Every day I start by introducing myself and my subject. I then ask for any questions comment thoughts or ripe tomatoes. During this time anything, well almost anything, goes. The rules of frufra are:

You may ask any question, give any comment, or make public any thoughts you would like.
Frufra is done when it ceases to be a whole group discussion.
There is a third rule, but it is a secret.

At the beginning of the year it is short. Some days it is short. Other days it lasts for a whole class period. Everyone is equal, and students quickly learn what topics will inspire more conversations and which ones less. I was struck by Vivian Gussin Paley's Article in Harvard Educational Review titled On Listening to What Children Say when she says, "Whenever discussion touched on fantasy, fairness, or friendship, participation zoomed upward." (page 124) This is very true. We all like to listen to stories that have their basis in reality. Students need this as well. They learn from their peers and what grabs attention.

I get a lot of questions about physics. This is important because I teach physics. I get a lot of questions about science. I get questions about life and school and family and myself. I get stories about brothers and sisters and dogs. About sickness and health, movies and sports. Johanna Kuyvenhoven says in her book In the Presence of Each Other, "Letting go of the conversation meant unpredictability." (Pg 74) But that is the key. Being open to what is on the group's mind each day is essential to gaining a places of openness that Parker J. Palmer says in To Know As We Are Known is the key to a place for truth seeking. "We must remember that we not only seek truth but that truth seeks us as well." If you are not open to this how can you know what it is?

I think that frufra also keeps me as a teacher informed and able to stay on top of the rest of life. It keeps me balanced to know what is happening around me in the world as my fellow learners are seeing it. Palmer talks about the importance of knowing what is happening in other disciplines as part of the spiritual journey of a teacher. "One discipline is the simple practice of studying in fields outside one's own." (page 114) What better guide to the world my students live in than the students themselves? While I realize this is not a discipline it goes towards my ability to translate between the culture of students and the culture of physics.

I remember vividly 5 years ago when a girl asked a questions at the top of her voice, "Mr. Peterson, do you have a girlfriend?" The room was silent. I smiled and she began to freak out. I had been dating for about 2 months the woman who would be come my wife. They asked all kinds of questions and the day was done. Everyone wanted to know all about Rebecca. I told them about my hope for the future and my excitement about the gifts God provided for me. I shared with them to story of my life, and they could think of their own lives in terms of the gifts of God. Kuyvenhoven correctly says, "All problem solving abilities, from physics and math to social studies and environmental science, depend on such senses of possibility." (Pg 147) The hope and the promise I could display in the story of my life would show up that year in the problem solving and inquiry that my students would do. Stories help us to imagine the possibilities, and stories come out during frufra.

Stories, transmission of culture, learning from each other, becoming equal learners, creating an open community. Frufra ties together the people in the room to become learners seeking truth.

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Pedagogical Autobiography: Traditions

2009-12-13T19:27:00.001-05:00

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Traditions EDUC520.m4v (7444 KB)

When you work at a summer camp the most important thing to find out is what the unwritten rules are. This is probably true anywhere, but camps make their money by carefully enforcing not rules, but traditions. This is not optional. Kids love structure and similarity. When the camp that I work at in the summer build new buildings that we heated, had walls, individual windows, every luxury you could imagine without ruining the summer environment, we had girls who were glad they were in the old cabins because to sleep in the new ones would have ruined their last year at camp.

The grace of God allowed me to to have a professor in college who let this line slide out in a class one day. He said he memorized his first paragraph of his lesson, his opener, for every class he taught for his first 5 years of teaching. I thought that was a heroic effort, and one that I could never replicate. I have to admit that I am never that sure of what is going to happen during a class period. But I thought of a solution. On the first day I taught I walked in and I said, "Hello, my name is Mr. Peterson and I will be your Earth Science teacher today." No one looked at me all that funny. This is quite common for the first day. Every once in a while on the first day someone will ask, "Are you our teacher tomorrow too?" Most often I just get the blank stares and smiles that come with the first day.

When it starts to get interesting is day two. I say the same thing. And again. It takes about two weeks before a student raises their hand and asks, "why?" Why do you do that. I explain that I am striving to meet the goals of a college professor that taught me to have my opener memorized. I explained that it would make them know that they were is a different class than had just been in and that I was there to help. Some days, when I am in a hurry, I forget. Usually one or two minutes in a students will raise their hand and say, "who are you and what are you trying to teach us?" I smile, introduce myself and know that community is being built.

Another piece of my tradition is the cookie song. It started out rather simple. I would sing the cookie song if there were cookies mentioned anywhere in the third period announcements. Since we have hot lunch and there was dessert with hot lunch this would happen quite regularly, may be twice a week. At the end of the song the students will join for the last part at the top of their lungs. It take 30 seconds, but does so much for the rest of the period. Soon I had to come up with how do we let other hours sing the song. Now if you bring cookies, homemade, for everyone in the class, I sing, they yell and sometimes I dance.

You wonder what this can do for a classroom? What does it add to the community other than unhealthy eating habits? I did not really know either until I was at a conference and there were cookies in the announcements. A student stood up in the class and sang my part of the song. The class yelled. The sub gave them zero hours. The next day I was still gone and there were cookies in the announcements. The student sang. The class yelled. The sub gave up. I had a long talk on Monday with the students about respect. They argued that they were respecting the community, I argued that they were not respecting the greater community. I am not sure who was right. I do know I was humbled by their loyalty to the class.

I have several other traditions, surrounding everything from how and when we take tests, to put downs (I have a zero tolerance tradition and traditional penalties that I apply to myself as well), to assignments, to birthdays, to question and answer time. I also have school wide traditions that involve stories that I tell in chapel and how I lead when asked at faculty events. Each of these thing make people feel safe where they are and comfortable with the environment they are in.

The research on this back me up. In her book on storytelling in the classroom called, In the Presence of Each Other by Johanna Kuyvenhoven, she says, "Learning depends a lot on being comfortable and happy in the room together." (Pg 88) I felt at home in the classroom described in the book with it daily rhythm of what would happen. The traditions of the room allowed for several different students from all walks of life and cultures to find their voices. Establishing who we are as a group, different from the rest of the world allows everyone, not just kids, the freedom to be who they are in that context. In the book the students have to be ready for their story time and Kuvenhoven established that early on they were not, but as the traditions became a part of who they were as a community, "As the weeks piled up behind us, children were almost always ready." (Pg 68) There was a sense that they became ready to learn as they became part of the learning. This is true as well in my classroom. Students are ready to learn when the traditions are established. They are ready to give to the purpose of the room once ground rules are established and they know where they are. I think that having some positive rules reminds them of a standard of behavior that is expected in the classroom, a standard of learning that is expected as well.

I think that Parker J Palmer in his book To Know As We Are Known argues for the same thing. In the book he claims that, "A learning space has three major characteristics, three essential dimensions: openness, boundaries, and an air of hospitality." (page 71) Of these the traditions I establish meet two of the goals, and lead directly in my experience to the remaining one. He says, "The teacher who wants to create an open learning space must define and defend its boundaries with care." (page 72) The boundaries are established by the traditions that I set in my classroom. The best part of setting them as traditions is that I need not be the only one who defends the boundaries. In the video attached to this post, listen closely as the cookie song comes. The students yell, "Dance!" I had not started by dancing, but the tradition would not be complete without it. They demand that the boarder is defended. Sometimes another teacher will walk into my room for some reason or another and they will hear students asking for other students to change their behavior or be more careful with equipment. I praise them for being a self disciplining classroom. They are defending the boarders of their learning.

Palmer's third pillar of an open classroom is the idea of hospitality, "a place where every stranger and every strange utterance is met with welcome." (page 74) I love that description, and I would like to think that I by defending the boarders with traditions we make a spot for everyone to be a part. I establish traditions for this very effort. I tell them how we are to treat new adults that enter the room. I establish traditions for students not from our hour. There are traditions for students who are late to class and students who have to leave early. We work at including everyone who comes through the physics barriers of our room and make them a part of the community within.

There are times when the traditions are not followed, and there are dangers to having too well established traditions. They can get in they way. But as we watch for their harmful effects they open the classroom itself to the possibility of openness, learning and truth seeking, unlike any classroom I have had before where I did not work hard of this. I am not sure exactly how I got here, but I too feel free to share more about who I am with my classes as we work out our lives and traditions together.

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Pedagogical Autobiography: Inquiry

2009-12-09T16:58:00.001-05:00

I sat down at an open house for a graduate of the school last spring. Near me was a parent who I recognized enough to know that I had his children in the past, but how long ago and what his children's names were I could not recall. I introduced myself and he said his name. We talked for a little while about what his kids were up to and how they were doing. Then he said to me, "you know we still use those speakers my son made in class, they sound great."

At the end of each year in physics I have a month and a half of open ended inquiry time. Independent research projects is what I call it. Students have to go and research some area of physics and come up with a product that represents their learning. I leave a lot of room for the students, but do have about 15 projects that have frames about them so that students are not left totally to their own devices. Constraints actually inspire creativity in many situations, so I do not feel bad giving students a topic or concept to explore, and they can always choose the last one, which is make your own project.

Inquiry is scary in this scenario, and it is on the surface doomed to fail. Seniors with six weeks of school left and all the pomp, circumstance and social traditions that distract them, are destined to not want to work hard. Yet some how when I give them room to fail they succeed to greater heights, for the most part. Every other year or so a students simply does nothing and fails. That is nothing compared to the successes. a single student who wastes 6 weeks of 45 minutes compared to lives changed is a small price to pay.

When I say lives changed I mean it. When as a teacher you take a step of faith and allow kids to fail some will. Others will soar. I remember the day that a student had me sign a note saying he could miss class on Friday because of his physics project. I asked, "why are you going to be gone for a whole day?" He replied that he had set up a day to meet with archaeologists at the Field Museum in Chicago. I quickly signed the note. He is a geologist today, putting his physics skill to work on rocks around the world.

One day a student went to shadow an engineer. She had shared with me her struggle with where to go to school and what to do once she graduated. She explained that she felt she really wanted to go to a Christian college but that there were none near here house and she needed to live at home for money reasons. I told her to pray about it, and that God had never denied me money when I needed it to do God's will. She came back from the job shadow and was so excited. While she was there the engineer had showed her a scholarship that he knew had no applicants that she qualified for. He also had a internship position in the lab he worked in that paid twice what she was making and had hired her. The money made up more than enough for her to go to the college of her dreams. It also confirmed for her that she was following the path that God had in store for her.

Two of my most popular projects started with a pair of student coming up after class and daring to ask if they could make up their own project. My only requirement for project like this is that there be a final product and that they produce a repeatable procedure for their project so if I like the project others can do it again. Now literally hundreds of students have done projects that other student invented and I had nothing to do with the forming of those projects. Usually these projects are more involved than I would ever require them to on their own. All I had to do is set up and environment where students are allowed to develop intelligence by asking questions and having new wonderful ideas about the material they gather to answer their questions. In the Having of Wonderful Ideas Duckworth says, "Knowing enough about things is one prerequisite for wonderful ideas." I try to set up the projects so that there is just enough to get the student started with the big questions of their topic and then they can move from there to the new wonderful ideas that they will find.

I also see this and being a direct implementation of the idea of teaching that Palmer presents in To Know As We Are Know. He says, "To teach is to create a space in which obedience to truth is practiced." I am not truth. I have some insight into truth but make no claim to being truth. When I set my students free to explore this they come up with so much more about the world and the truth there in than I could ever show them. When I give them to a subject and let the subject show them the way they learn more than I could ever ask them to learn. In Griffith's book In The Borderlands of Teaching and Learning, he says, "We should help guide the ship, but not be its sole captain." (pg 40) This is not the way I was taught or even taught to teach. He compares teaching to jazz and describes it this way, "The interaction between teachers and learners are experiments in fluidity with both trying to constuct meaning and forge understanding. The path is not linear, but is can be found."

Schools are not set up for this type of learning at all. We need to remedy this. Here is a selection of links to projects that my students have done over the years.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/37698117@N08/

http://ajwest.posterous.com/
http://darendsen.posterous.com/
http://natesall.posterous.com/
http://nmichmerhuizen.posterous.com/

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Pedagogical Autobiography: Differentiated Problem Solving

2009-12-09T15:12:00.001-05:00

The picture is from physics night. It was taken at 9:30 PM on a Monday night at school in the physics room. There is Monday Night Football on the screens and there are clusters of students working together around the room. They are working on a program called CAPA, a web based assignment tool.

The story of differentiated problem solving starts with two people, neither of whom necessarily thought they were advancing a relational way of teaching. A professor at Hope asked me if I wanted to piggy back for free on their web base problem system. I said I was interested and started picking problems. I had a computer at every lab station, something that our principal had funded, and thought that I could figure out a way of selling this type of assignment to the students. When I went to the principal to talk through it with him he demanded that I have a night a week where the room was open for students to come and use the computers, in case they did not have computers at home. So we settled on this plan. I would give homework on Tuesday, a whole weeks worth. Friday would be question and answer day in class. Monday night the computer lab would be open for students to come in and work if they wanted to, with the problems being due at 11:30 that night. This has been my basic schedule in physics for 10 years. I fill the week with other work, like discovery labs and discussions, and the homework and reading happens parallel to the course in the evenings.

So far none of this seems all that radical. I cannot over emphasize how much it has changed my teaching. It took no time to realize what gold the Monday evenings were. We were all learning together. Since everyone has different problems, that the computer keeps track of for me, I can have some comfort in knowing that students who are working together are talking about physics, not copying problems. I learned that I could assign a lot less problems and get more conversation about the root of the problems out of my students. The Monday nights were really a club. A club in the sense of Frank Smith's clubs in The Book of Learning and Forgetting where on page 11 he defines clubs as, "communities of influential people." Without really trying I had brought together a group of people who we interested in solving physics problems.

And if you walk into the room you will find that is what it sound like. A physics club. And I say that because a physics class sounds different, and to some extent has to sound different. I almost always have something going on the television. If not there is music. There are students arguing about physics concepts and how to apply them. There are students helping each other or asking me questions. There are also students talking football, baseball, choir, and math. There is a lot of socializing. There is a lot of food some years. There is some anxiety because they cannot find their place in the room or the discussion that will benefit them the most. There are students that meet in the hall because they need to be away from the noise.

On top of all of this there are also a variety of student needs that are addressed. Some have the normal physics questions. Even those are broken down into two categories. Some are questions about problem solving, numbers equations and math. Other students gather to discuss and argue how the concepts of physics apply to real world questions that I pose to them each week based on the same material. Other students come because they are done with the problems and would like to help. They are members of the same club who are there to help. This is integral to Smith's idea, because club members, "don't teach you; they help you." (page 18) Finally there is an interesting group of students who come to do other work. Sometimes it is brothers and sisters who have to come, but end up enjoying themselves and finding a room full of people willing to help them. Sometimes it is peers who just would rather study in the presence of the activity of learning.

Differentiated problem solving allows my class to become a club. A social physics learning club. Few things have been a more powerful force in my teaching career.

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Pedagogical Autobiography: Learners

2009-12-06T21:56:00.001-05:00

Download now or listen on posterous

Learners.m4a (1466 KB)

Please Listen to the story first.

This story is a moment of crisis in my career, and I had not even stood in front of my own classroom ever. The summer after graduating and before teaching I had been hired as the tripping director at Camp Roger, just north of Grand Rapids, Michigan. That same summer a good friend and fellow counselor for the past three summers had been hired as the adventure director. We went into the summer with very different strategies. He went in looking to have fun with the the staff and through having fun with them and taking them on adventures he would build their abilities to have fun with kids and take them on adventures as well. My strategy was to tell them what to do and make sure it got done.

The tripping program was a success that summer in the sense that kids had fun, probably only a little less than the year before. Kids we safe, there were no accidents or run to the emergency room. But as the story indicates I spent the whole summer doing work that the counselors should have wanted to do. I was doing it because they were not even remotely interested in the camping that I had taught them. It was not fun or interesting. It was not a personal adventure. It was led, by me, as a do it this way and everything will work out fine. No one listened and I knew it.

That fall one of the most amazing moments of my career happened. I walked into class the fourth or fifth day and after a lecture I assigned student to read a section of the textbook. I also gave them a worksheet to fill out to make sure the reading was done. The next day every student had filled in the paper. Every single one of them. I was amazed. I was shocked. Why would they do that? I think looking back on it I was a little sad that they had not rebelled against a silly assignment like that. I was amazed that they had not just copied all the blanks from a neighbor in study hall (some probably did). I was amazed at the poser I had. I was more amazed later that week when I gave a test and many of the students got answers wrong that they had filled out on my worksheet just a few days before. The worksheet had been almost without value even though it was all done.

A couple years later I read this poem by Robert Frost

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

I read it in a book by Parker J Palmer. It changed my teaching forever. Palmer described a classroom that I wanted to be a part of. He described a classroom where I was not the holder of truth. He described a classroom where God wanted us to all dance in concert around a subject, each looking for a unique perspective every day and every time we looked. Each contributing to that conversation in our own way. From that moment on I decided that I needed to fill my room with learners. No teachers, no students, all learners. Palmer himself describes it on the introduction to his book To Know As We Are Known when he says, "But what scholars now say -- and what good teachers have always known -- is the real learning does not happen until students are brought into relationship with the teacher, with each other, and with the subject." (pg xvi)

Palmer goes on to explore why this must be. He starts with who we are, "The deepest wellspring of our desire to know is the passion to recreate the organic community in which the world was first created." (pg 8) We are God's creation, all of us connected to the creator by the love of this same creator. Since we are each connected in a different way, in a uniquely created way, to God's love, then we must all be learners together in this journey. But the journey to know is not enough. True learning becomes part of who you are, "A knowledge that springs from love may require us to change, even sacrifice, for the sake of what we know. It is easy to be curious and controlling. It is difficult to love." (pg 9) If the learners leave the classroom one day and we have not changed some piece of who we are, or at least moved in steps towards that, then I as the person who sets up the context of that learning have not succeeded. If the lesson did not have a chance of changing me then I have not succeeded, because I was not a part of the learning. "Truthful knowing weds the knower and the known; even in separation, the two become part of each other's life and fate." (pg 31)

So how does this practically play itself out each day in my classroom? First, I try hard to ask questions that I want to know the answer to. Rarely silly questions that all have the same answer for every person. This lends a level of ambiguity to the class that not all teachers are comfortable with. You have to be willing to put 'play' on the lesson plan. You have to be willing to branch out away from your chosen topic for a while because the connections other learners will make are not known to you. I aspire to be Bill from Vivian Gussin Paley's Article in Harvard Educational Review titled On Listening to What Children Say. I want to bring, "paper bags full of show-and-tell, and he and the children the children talked about a wide range of ordinary phenomena." (pg 122)

I try hard to take all questions comments and concerns at any point. It took me a while to get to this point. Learners learn from each other. If I am to be a learner I need to understand why others around me are not learning and what I can do in their view to improve my role. This was hard to learn, because I like to be in charge. This is actually a flaw of many teachers. We are comfortable with the doors to our room shut not open. Someone reading this not from education will think of this as elitist or arrogant, but I think it stems from the fact that we are vulnerable on any given day to make very public mistakes and no one wants their mistakes public. Any way that you may perceive this, I look to my classes as sources of knowledge about how to view the world differently from my own way. This has made me a little more comfortable with getting comments that are different than my own.

I look at my students as coequal learners. I set us all up in a room full of stuff or ideas and we all dig in and try to make sense of it. The more likely someone is to come up with a different answer than what I thought might be the answer the more I like the lesson. Palmer says that we need to make our classroom hospitable where, "every stranger and every strange utterance is met with welcome." (Pg 74)

If I am not learning new content myself I challenge myself to learn a new way of looking at the the content. Content is important. I need to bring the people in the room to a knowledge of the language and thinking of science to ask bigger and better questions. The hard part of doing this is not all learners need the same content. They all need different parts of the content that I would like to see them to explore and work with. I think exploring new ways of learning and knowing shows the other learners that there are big questions to look at. It models the dance of learning that Frost talks about.

In the story I told at the beginning Jame dug in and explored having fun with the counselors he was training. The world was a place to have fun in and play games and love each other in. I modeled a world that did not exist in the woods, and that was probably my biggest mistake. Camping never goes the way it is supposed to. Why would anyone teach it from the perspective that you will have fun if you follow these rules. Now I take my counselors in the woods every spring. We walk, canoe or backpack out and have a wonderful time. I ask them what they know, what they have experienced. I forget stuff and have to make do with what I have. I tell stories around the campfire. The first night they camp alone in the woods I walk up and hide behind trees and see what is happening. Sometimes I teach something, sometimes I smile and walk past. They are learning, and sometimes that needs support and sometimes it need space. I like to think I do the same in my class. Giving them room to explore the new language I have shown them. Giving us all a space to play with the subject that God has put in our room to explore.

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Pedagogical Autobiography

2009-12-05T16:12:00.001-05:00

I am taking a course at Calvin College this semester. It is called Theories of Instruction, EDUC 520. For this class I need to write a Pedagogical Autobiography. As I understand it pedagogy is why I do things the way I do in the classrooms that I am given each day. Your pedagogy is autobiographical because at some level it completely reflects your understanding of what works.

That last phrase, "what works," requires a little flesh before I leave it. I think what works is defined in hundreds of different ways in classrooms and schools and districts worldwide. Part of what this class helped me to discover is what I think about what works. I think what works in my estimation is setting up a room so that the highest number of students are willing and able to interact with the subject and ask everyone in the room about those interactions. In The Book of Learning and Forgetting Frank Smith puts it this way, "If the students are engaged in activities involving mathematics or science, or engineering, and they don't look bored or confused, we know they are learning about mathematics, science and engineering." (Pg 65) I have held that phrase in my head everyday since I read it. Few phrases so perfectly describe the criteria I have used over the years for throwing out plans and for keeping them. If you are one of my students or former students you can feel free to disagree, it would be really interesting if you did.

I have picked six things that define my classroom. Some of them more than others. I will tell a story about the practice or its origin and connect it to the reading I have done this semester. Along the way feel free to comment if you think it is different. Feel free to ask questions if I am not clear enough. Feel free to comment back your experience was different from how I portray it. Feel free to comment if you think I should have picked other, more defining, characteristics of my classroom.

Here are the six defining characteristics: Traditions, FruFra, Inquiry, Collaborative Problem Solving, Learners, Failure.

May be I should take one paragraph to explain why I am doing this in a public blog, especially one my students and colleagues might read. I asked to. I really struggled withe the decision to go to school to get my masters degree. It is not a convenient time at all to do this. Yet somehow it feels right. I would like to test my 10 years of learning from a personal learning network against traditional education. I would like to see what kind of impact I have in both places because of the work I do in both places. I am not sure why it did not strike me until the final paper that I should do all the course work in my blog, but now it seems obvious. Look for me to post all my work from the course here as time goes by, although the forum posting will not show up because it is integral to other people's work. I wonder why we keep this work behind the walls of a garden? I am going to try not to anymore.

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Journal Of Awesome Things #234

2009-11-27T08:42:00.001-05:00

Journal Of Awesome Things #234

November 25th, 2009 by Dan Meyer

#234: Generations of Edubloggers

This is my third year blogging about teaching. A profoundly cool byproduct of edublogging is that on occasion you get to be the dealer who hooks someone up with her first hit of online expression. Someone reads something you wrote and her response is visceral enough to overcome her online inhibition and comment. And she lives for awhile in various comment boxes around the blogosphere until those confines cramp her too much and she gets a Blogger or Wordpress blog of her own.

I haven't given enough thought to this but, among the blogs I read and wander past, there seems to be a generational effect at work and it freaks me out. I'm not presuming an exact genetic link, where I gave "birth" to blogs that came after mine. I'm referring to timing.

Chris Lehmann's Practical Theory, for instance, was the first edublog I read. His blog motivated me to turn a private blog public. Jackie Ballarini was one of my earliest commenters who eventually set out to do her own thing. A year after Jackie Ballarini you had Kate Nowak, one of Jackie's readers, now submitting fine work at f(t). A year after Kate Nowak you have Elissa Miller writing up the new teacher experience at Miss Calculate.

No doubt, all of our decisions to hang out our own shingles were motivated by more than just one graybeard blogger. I have no idea, for instance, where Ian Garrovillas, Sam Shah, and Sean Sweeney fit into in this timeline nor do I have any idea if Twitter accelerates or decelerates this process. But the general effect is clear: people take their education into their own hands which provokes other people later on to do the same thing.

It's a process that boggles me a little bit, that makes me want to break out into song a little bit, that I recommend wholeheartedly to new teachers who now have the luxury of selecting mentors from all around the world.

Two questions:

Who were you reading before you started blogging? Where were you commenting? How did you get into this? I'm especially curious of people upstream like Chris Lehmann and Christian Long and that Dangerously Irrelevant guy, all of whom basically predate the Internet in my head.

Does this place ever seem to you like Lost island? I swear, sometimes I click around and become aware of an entire other side to this place, blogs that link to none of the blogs I read and vice versa. Bud Hunt has written this one up but he doesn't explain how any of us ended up on this side of the island or, more importantly, what the four-toed statute means!

16 Comments »

16 Responses to “Journal Of Awesome Things #234”

on 25 Nov 2009 at 9:56 am1 JasonP / InnerEd

Dan, you’d be the one I’d probably have to give the most props, too. I read you for a good 18 months before starting my own blog. Shoot, I read you for a good nine before I even commented. I was reading some other stuff that time as well, including:

Eduwonk (Andrew Rotherham)

Thoughts on Teaching (Todd Seal)

Teaching in the 408 (KB)

Also, I was reading a great deal of the content on EdNews, which i was doing for a good year before I really started reading individual teacher blogs.

While no blog has birthed InnerEd, these are all writing styles and approaches that I appreciate. Todd’s the one I’ve probably mentioned the most on my own blog.

And yes, you’ve developed a web around you. I’ve got 1-2 blogs on my RSS feeder that I found just by being curious and clicking on a few links in the comments. For example, I read one called “On the Other Side of the Brain”, which is by a guy who I clicked on out of curiosity in your comment page when he claimed that blogging had little value because you were writing to a vacuum.

on 25 Nov 2009 at 10:40 am2 Tom Hoffman

Scripting News — Dave Winer.

Slashdot.

Talking Points Memo — Josh Marshall.

Old school!

on 25 Nov 2009 at 11:07 am3 Elissa

The first blog I ever read was actually Sam Shah’s. I started reading blogs when I was a substitute teacher to prepare me for the next year. I liked his blog but knew I would not be teaching calculus and it seemed kind of over my head. From his blog, I found yours but I didn’t like you.

The first (and only) post I read, you came off as condescending and rude so I thought, “I will never read that blog again.” I also found Kate’s blog from Sam’s. I never commented on Sam’s but Kate’s was more my style. I also found Mr. D at teachforever.com which I read and commented on the most. Then I started Twitter and found lots of other blogs, almost too many to choose from. Everyone kept talking about this dy/dan guy and linking to his blog and I thought, “What’s the big deal?” So I read some more of your blog…and more and more and more. I became obsessed and started reading it all the time and looking through all the old stuff and reading every comment and so on. I watched all the videos and downloaded as many lessons as I could. I’m still a stalker.

I’m not totally sure what made me start my own blog but I’m pretty sure it’s my mantra of ‘Anything you can do, I can do better”. Although that turned out to be false, I love having a place to put my thoughts. And some people actually care and write it back! Reading blogs has seriously changed my whole perception of education, teaching, school, assessment, and learning in general. It frustrates me on a daily basis because I can not adequately give my students what I know they are missing. Which I didn’t know until I started blogging. Thanks for the frustration! I’m kidding but not. The blogs of all you more intelligent, more experienced teachers has created a goal for me to work toward, a pattern to simulate, an image to imitate, and permission to create. And for that, me and my blog thank you!

on 25 Nov 2009 at 11:14 am4 Glenn

The first blog I read regularly was yours, Dan. From there I discovered the love of RSS and have been getting feeds of all the people you mentioned for over a year now.

I have not been blogging as much as I want to this year, but I have been forming some ideas about what Teacher Leadership is and is not. More and more of my ideas of Teacher Leadership centers around what goes on on “this side of the island” as you put it.

on 25 Nov 2009 at 11:40 am5 iTeach

Hi Dan,
Actually yours was the first blog I read. One of Jackie Ballarini’s old colleagues turned me to your blog (probably because Jackie turned him), then I began reading many others. I’ve actually never commented on yours, but did read quite a few posts. I only recently started blogging on my own because I saw how it helped many others become more reflective practitioners as well as share ideas and materials with people around the country. So thank you for the exposure and the ideas. Keep up the good work!

on 25 Nov 2009 at 12:12 pm6 Alex

This isn’t unique to edublogging: think role models in general. If you’re ever wondering whether female / black CEOs / math teachers matter, *this is why.*

on 25 Nov 2009 at 1:52 pm7 Sue

I was on the Yahoo group Living Math Forum, which is mainly homeschooling moms, because I was trying to get a handle on how to teach kids, when all my experience is college level.

From there I found out about the Kaplan’s math circles, and saw Denise’s blog, Let’s Play Math! I can’t say I was following any blogs regularly until I got set up with Google Reader. Kate got me started with my own blog.

Now I follow 94 blogs, mostly math teachers.

on 25 Nov 2009 at 2:00 pm8 Jason Dyer

I felt weird just emailing it so I started a blog so I could post my comedy response to your annual report contest.

Sort of an inglorious start, but eh, it works.

on 25 Nov 2009 at 2:33 pm9 Scott Schwister

A karmic twist to the generational theory that’s worth noting: graybeards who hang up their cleats (or keyboards, or whatever edubloggers hang up when they *retire* from formal blogging), and then, phoenix-like, reinvent themselves and rise again from the ashes and mashups. Birth…and rebirth, perhaps?

Welcome back, Christian Long and think:lab.

http://twitter.com/ChristianLong/statuses/6060318118

http://thinklab.typepad.com/think_lab/

on 25 Nov 2009 at 2:38 pm10 JYB

Don’t really know how I got here. I originally started looking in the blogosphere when I was trying to revamp my assessment style. I think I started with whatitslikeontheinside.com. I think it was scienceblogs.com that I read the most though. I’d say it was Kate’s rubber band ball lesson that really got me hooked on the blogosphere as a place to have my mind blown versus something I just check in to in order to get info.

As for the Lost thing…this is something I’ve often struggled with. Somehow through you and Kate I ended up with this strange loop (not in a Hofstadter sense) of blogs that all sort of link to each other and generally pat each other’s back. First, I’m a science teacher and would like some really good science ones. Second, we may disagree on minor issues but the overall philosophies are similar. I worry that I’m doing the equivalent of Dick Cheney only watching Fox News.

on 25 Nov 2009 at 7:24 pm11 Dan Meyer

@Scott, interesting phenomenon there. Christian goes dark and then comes back in from the cold. John Pederson keeps the blog but nukes all the posts. I don’t really understand either impulse but there are probably as many right ways to blog as there are bloggers.

@JYB, I want to believe that the bloggers on my side of Edublog Island have congregated because “the overall philosophies are similar” and not so much because we indulge each others’ egos.

Of the thirty nominees for best teacher blog 2008 I had heard of seven. And one was mine. That’s just kinda … weird to me.

on 25 Nov 2009 at 9:32 pm12 JYB

It’s not so much that I think the problem is ego indulgence. I’ve seen a lot of examples of what I want to be doing but haven’t been able to pull off yet. It’s definitely nice seeing those ideas put into concrete form. Because we all sort of think the same, I’m worried I’m missing those moments where I’m smacked on the side of the head.

Example: I was watching Independent Lens “Objectified” last night and the designer in the beginning (Dan Formosa) told a story about how clients give a profile of their average customer. He essentially said he doesn’t care and wants to know about the outliers, the quote is something like “if we understand what the extremes are, the middle will take care of itself.”

In one fell swoop he was able to clarify my general feelings on educational research and in class instruction. In research we focus too much on the mean and effect size when what we should care about are the extremes. Tell me about the one group that moved forward 2.5 grade levels not the overall .4 effect size.

In class I don’t know how many times I’ve had meetings with principals/trainers/developers and they tell me to choose 3 kids in the middle and teach directly towards them. What I should be doing is picking the bottom kid and the top kid and taking care of them.

I worry I’m missing those “you’re doing it wrong” moments.

on 25 Nov 2009 at 10:23 pm13 Ryan

Yours was the first blog I read, back in 2007-2008. By the end of that year, I decided to start writing.

I think I’d been introduced to RSS in 2006, but I didn’t start using it effectively until my colleague got me into reading educational blogs. He started blogging shortly after I did (http://digitalclass.wordpress.com/).

on 26 Nov 2009 at 11:01 am14 monika hardy

It’s a process that boggles me a little bit, that makes me want to break out into song a little bit, that I recommend wholeheartedly to new teachers who now have the luxury of selecting mentors from all around the world.

this is huge – and what we should be offering our students…the luxury of expert tutors from all around the world.

that way jyb – we’re reaching all of them. not just three in the middle, or some at each end.

the web is allowing this for the first time ever – in public school.

thank you all for modeling it.

on 26 Nov 2009 at 8:11 pm15 Tom

I started reading around 2004, blogging in 2005. There didn’t seem to be that many education related blogs back then. I think it was Steve Dembo (he was a classroom teacher back then) and Bud Hunt that got me interested in actually writing my own blog. I got a free blog with James Farmer on a crazy new derivative of WP called WPMU. That was pre-Edublogs.org so my address was something like http://www.incsub.org/wpmu/bionicteacher – very memorable. It’s long gone now, which sucks (and probably also protects me from some embarrassment).

It would be really interesting to visualize how these networks work. If people still used blog rolls you could crawl and scrape things to get a pretty decent look at at least a couple of levels down.

I’m pretty interested in how these networks form, work, and are sustained. The buy in part is also interesting. I see the worth, you see it, lots of other people do but I can’t even get some people to look at this. It strikes them as incredibly stupid and time consuming- which is never a good combination.

on 26 Nov 2009 at 11:00 pm16 Mr. Sweeney

I found your blog first, Dan, about a year ago. For awhile there I was pretty much exclusively reading your and Kate’s blogs. Sam’s became one of the big three sometime around when I started my own. Then I became part of the community and I follow a lot more. I actually don’t think I really commented at all. I’m shy. (haha) I started looking because I was part of this technology learning network thing with a bunch of area schools. On it’s own, I wasn’t that impressed with the program, but it got me looking which inevitably was a win.

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via feedproxy.google.com

I am not sure if you are a blog reader or even if you are aware of the power it can be for a teacher. Here is a blog post by my favorite math teacher blogger. He links in the post to several other math and just teacher blogs. If you do have a Google Reader, add them for a while and follow. If you do not, then google, "Google Reader" and find out how to keep track of things. Then later start your own blog.

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Hydrogen and Oxygen Exploding

2009-11-19T12:05:00.001-05:00

via flickr.com

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Effective Project Based Learning

2009-11-14T13:20:00.001-05:00

Notes on PBL from Gary Stager's presentation.
What makes a good project?

Purpose
Time
Personally Meaningful
Complex, open to Serendipity
Connected - across disciplines, intelligences, people
Shareable
Access to Constuctive Materials

Questions to ask when you make a project.

Is the problem solvable?
Is the project important?
Who does it satisfy?

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PersonalBrain

2009-11-13T11:41:00.001-05:00

http://www.thebrain.com/

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Keynote 1 – Anita Givens

2009-11-13T11:19:00.001-05:00

Texas adopts textbooks state wide. They are now allowing Open Source, and for some odd reason will pay for it. Each year they have a proclamation about what subjects they are willing to pay for this year, Google Texas Proclamation 2010 and 2011.

CA has 10 online textbook for free use in CA.

21st Century Physics Flexbook from Virginia.

Texas is a beast that is moving slowly, but moving. They have rewritten their textbook laws to encourage districts to rid themselves of textbooks and go electronic. They are giving 50% of the savings to the districts that adopt cheaper electronic or open source textbooks. This is a warning shot over the bow of the publishers, which I think are dead if Texas succeeds.

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A Different Morning

2009-11-09T09:15:00.001-05:00

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A Different Morning

2009-11-09T08:51:00.001-05:00

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jim

2009-10-21T15:16:00.001-04:00

Posted via SMS from Jim's posterous

Constant Velocity Stopped On One Side

2009-10-08T20:56:00.001-04:00

Download now or watch on posterous

ConstantNegativeAcceleration.m4v (15666 KB)

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ConstantPositiveAcceleration.m4v (12110 KB)

Posted via email from Jim's posterous

Finding Other Variables on Velocity Time Graphs

2009-10-07T16:08:00.001-04:00

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Finding Other Variables.mp4 (7978 KB)

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Where have we been? Where are we going?

2009-08-27T07:36:00.001-04:00

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been_and _going.m4v (23814 KB)

In the first segment of our opening tech session we asked teachers to place themselves on a progression of adoption of Moodle tools in their classroom.

Posted via email from Jim's posterous

MACUL 7 - Project Based PD

2009-03-20T10:12:00.003-04:00

Title
Design of a Project-Based, Learning-Focused Teacher Development Course

Alternate Title
Pre-Service Teachers Are Getting Better Prepared, But Only Very Slowly

Presenters
Sharon Peterson and Kelsey Woodard, Instructors, and Brian Horvitz, Assistant
Professor, Western Michigan University

Running Thoughts
Recommended ITSE's Reinventing Project-Based Learning.

Recommended TaskStream, a lesson planning and sharing tool.

Another recommend for google sites from someone at the MACUL conference.

MACUL 6 - Beyond Essays

2009-03-20T08:42:00.004-04:00

Title
Going Beyond Essays: New Kids, New Media, and New Literacies

Alternate Title

Presenter
Jason Ohler, President’s Professor, Educational Technology, University of Alaska/jasonohler.com

Running Thoughts
He is talking about creativity and the blank sheet software idea. He is talking about the need to be creative in the same media that we consume.

Digital Art Oral Written - the four areas students need today in literacy.

He said we need to teach students how to make the stuff before we can teach them to analyze the stuff. This is how we do it with text, why not with audio and video?

He pointed out that 80% of the work of a project that is published is in the polishing, only 20% in the content. In school we should accept that rough draft is good enough, and if they are interested students will polish it themselves.

Reflection
I like what he said. We need to teach new literacy. We need to teach how to make the stuff that we teach the meaning of. A student who has made a movie will understand how meaning is developed better. I loved the idea that everything can be fine if it only gets to rough draft. Interesting ideas.

MACUL 5 - Cell Phones

2009-03-19T16:04:00.004-04:00

Title
Toys to Tools: Connecting Students’ Cell Phones to Learning

Alternate Title
Use the Technology Kids Have

Presenter
Liz Kolb, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Madonna University

Running Thoughts
wifiiti.com is really cool. Send a text message and it shows up on the screen.

To get her contact information text KOLB to 50500.

ChaCha call 1-800-2chacha or TEXT to CHACHA.

drop.io allows you to record messages.

Second mention today of polleverywhere.com.

Photos can go to flickr of course or drop.io as well.

Look at earfl.com sometime.

There are some tools for sending lots of text messages like textmarks.com.

dial2do.com does speach to text. It also allows you to listen to web pages and translation.

Collaborative novels at textnovel.com.

Reflections
I could use the photo places for scaling activities in physics. I could also require a year long 10 photos of physics phenomenons wherever you are. What I loved about this session was the noise. I was tired when I walked in and so were many people you could see it on their faces. Yet as soon as she told us to start exploring and using these text features there was all this positive noise. It was uplifting, like when you class is really humming with good work.

MACUL 4 - pH

2009-03-19T14:12:00.002-04:00

Title
MACUL Science Grant: pH and Probes

Alternate Title
Teacher Works Hard to Find Money to Make Learning Interactive

Presenter
Helene Barton, Teacher, Detroit Public Schools

Handouts
Two labs on an 8.5x11, and a bookmark sized online review activity.

Running Thoughts
She has a great story about writing three grants to over the four years to get pH probes and handheld data gathering devices. She obviously cares deeply about here students and had a great story about just how she got all her equipment and why it was important to have the equipment.

Great Idea: when testing antacids she has the students bring in what they or their families think are the best. She talked about how the random selection of antacids caused unexpected results, especially when measuring pH by indicator and the tablets have color. She then pointed out how good it was that we teachers model dealing with unexpected results. Awesome: she puts herself in situations where you will have to model good behavior.

Reflection
Using technology is still more interesting to kids than not.

MACUL - Booths

2009-03-19T13:28:00.004-04:00

Two companies piqued my interest while touring the exhibit hall. I am not a huge fan of blocking software but reality requires it. We need to improve ours to be more granular, so that kids can easily move between different levels of filtering depending on their responsibility.

One is Cymphonix. They have a 2 year old mac client with LDAP. It is an inline box that does packet shaping. Very similar to DeepNines. He was non committal about pricing.

The other one was cipafilter.com. This works as a proxy server with locked down browsers. The difference between this and our current squid proxy is that filtering settings are based on LDAP groups. We could just move kids in and out of groups in workgroup manager to change their filtering status.

MACUL 3 - Apps for Administrators

2009-03-19T13:11:00.002-04:00

Title
Apps for Administrators: Tools to Support SIP... and More!

Alternate Title
A Principal Who Likes How He Gets His Job Done

Presenter
Douglas Bush, Principal, and Kristi Bush, District Media Specialist, Shepherd

Running Thoughts
First union bashing joke at minute 19.

Using Google Docs to create documents, excellent idea. I wonder how I could get my principal to do more with that or Zimbra Docs?

Their school has ZAP - Zeros Aren't Permitted. Instead of allowing zeros on homework they have to come in after school and do the work. Not sure how I feel about this.

Left Early

MACUL 2 - Professional Development Using Moodle

2009-03-19T10:34:00.006-04:00

Title
Using Moodle to Deliver Quality Professional Development

Alternate Title
The Tech Tips and Treats Moodle Course Is Really Sweet

Handouts
http://deliveringpd-moodle.wikispaces.com

Running Thoughts
These presenters expected those here to have internet. Since it is not working, that stinks for them. It also stinks for us.

They have 12 hours of required choice PD. They deliver this through Moodle.

Offer stipends for teachers who lead the courses for PD. Interesting idea. They have synchronous courses, which is the strength of moodle. I wonder if this would be an interesting way to practice asynchronous training.

They use their own moodle server.

The board has a moodle course for distribution of board minutes and forum discussions among board members. I wonder if this can help us with some of our communication issues.

Reflection
There were some solid reminders about moving teachers into the online education world. However I did not think they were doing anything that we were not doing with our more informal tech training websites.

MACUL 1 - Digital Learning

2009-03-19T08:39:00.005-04:00

Title
Student as Contributor: The Digital Learning Farm

Alternate Title
Make Your Kids Own Their Learning

Presenter
Alan November, Senior Partner, November Learning

Running Thoughts
Alan thinks outside the box.

Without citing a source drops the believable bomb that schools in China filter less than schools in America. Take that facebook blockers.

He challenged us to get rid of closed note and book tests. I really like that, but it really changes what questions you can ask.

A good open book question: Which of the following is less true?

Just made the argument for unblocking YouTube.

Teachers should ask students to find 10 assignments that help them learn an objective. Students become curriculum researchers. Never answer student questions in class. But to do this you do need to teach great searching skills. Teach them to create a custom search engine.

Teachers need to shift control of the learning to the students.

How does the work that students do help others? Homework only helps themselves. The real power of the web is in building community, something that we believe is our key skill. The students can start, "transforming the world for Jesus Christ," right now.

Ended with a billboard.

Reflection
I love Alan. His latest book might even be worth a buy. He challenges us to think about the world in new ways, and that is always a wonderful challenge. I think his vision for education fits so well with ours, but it will be hard to get everyone there because of the control issues at every level. He presents an image of kids doing meaningful work as part of their educational process to change the world.

MACUL

2009-03-19T08:34:00.002-04:00

We are at MACUL in Detroit. Expect reports frequently.

Triva in the Age of Google and Facebook

2009-03-17T09:45:00.000-04:00

For St. Patrick's Day each teacher is wearing a green paper shamrock. To get your shamrock students must answer your trivia question (after class of course). Each shamrock is worth a point in our school's class cup, a year long student council run competition.

My question was, "What is my wife maiden name?"

It was a work day in class, working on our part of Holland's energy week. Soon students were working hard, but on what? Suddenly, as I walked around the room I was hearing my wife's maiden name pronounced wrong all over the room. I reminded them that I would not be taking questions until the bell rang and that the pronunciation had to be correct. At the end of the hour I had a line and the right answer, correctly pronounced. In fact it was correctly pronounced by my own father in law.

The students had facebooked my wife (who was on Facebook right at that moment) to come up with her maiden name. Facebook is blocked on their laptops, but not of course on their phones. She told me she got three messages. To get the pronunciations they typed, "how do I pronounce..." into Google. My father in law is in the State Assembly in Wisconsin. For constituents the Assembly provides an audio link of each representative pronouncing their name.

There are so many lessons to take away from this. What strikes you?

Classroom Observation Bonus: Routine

2009-03-02T14:57:00.000-05:00

Today I had to sub for AP Chemistry class. I walked in and the student (who I have all had in physics, so there was a built previous relationship between be and each student). What I love is that the students walked in and it was Friday. They take a timed online quiz and finish their lab work. That is what my lesson plan said. That is what they did without ever asking what the plan was. Students were even a little early and waiting for the quiz to open, which it did five seconds after the bell rang.

We all love some tradition. The longer I have taught the more I think kids love it best of all. This class was just a reminder of how effective a tool this is in basic classroom management. I do not remember anyone in ED 301 telling me set up routines in your classroom and practice them. Students will like it.

Observation 4: Classroom Management

2009-02-28T14:37:00.000-05:00

I loved a lot of things about my last classroom observation but one of the best parts was a little laptop classroom management detail that was awesome. Laptops do create a management problem. Any tech person who tells you differently is selling snake oil. Any teach who says that they cannot make the change is selling themselves short. Tech people around the country have lost all credibility by telling teachers it will be easier. Maybe some day it will be, but it is always hard work to make a change. Valuable, but hard.

In the class I observed there ware two students who were not using their laptops to work on their Spanish. The teacher, who is very observant, ignored them all hour. I kept wondering what she was going to do. Then, one minute before the bell she went over to them and asked how many videos they had commented on. "Two" and "Three and a half" were their responses. She smiled at them and raised her voice so the whole class could hear, "the rest of these are homework." Several students replied that they were done or close to done.

I assume this was all done in a context. These students needed to be allowed to fail. If they have questions the teacher will answer them outside of class. Hopefully they learned a lesson and enjoyed their time in class as much as they would have at home. There was no way that they did not know they had not used their time wisely.

Classroom Observation 4: Revamping a Lesson

2009-02-24T12:33:00.000-05:00

I was in a Spanish 3 class to observe technology in action. After class I asked the teacher about the lesson and she described to me the conversion process to the technology enhanced lesson. It was cool to hear what went into her plan. Allow me to share her story.

She is teaching the subjunctive, which is commonly used when giving advice. In the past she wrote in Spanish three "problems" seeking advice. The students then had to write a response back to her giving her advice about any one of the problems.

In the laptop age she designed the assignment this way. Students had to use their MacBook camera and Photo Booth to take a video of themselves talking about a fake problem they are seeking advice on in Spanish. They then emailed this problem to a posterous site where the teacher had made them all contributors. In class that day the students had to comment, in Spanish, on each video. They had to make sure they did not repeat advice which meant they were always looking to post on a video that had the fewest comments and spread out the commenting to everyone's video. It also meant that the students had to read several comments. They also could get extra credit by correcting mistakes other students had made.

This lesson took no more time out of the teacher's allotted class time to teach the subjunctive. It had a speaking writing and reading part instead of just a reading and writing. On top of all that the problems were more diverse and more creative. An awsome example of the laptop difference.

Classroom Observation 4: A Broader Audience

2009-02-24T12:32:00.001-05:00

Spanish 3
Originally uploaded by weathertation

I visited another classroom this week. The basics of the activity involved students commenting on other students blog posts. I watched as the teacher answered questions all hour, moving frenetically around the room. She took 30 seconds to say to tell me that because the comments were being read by other students there were dozens more questions than the same less done on paper last year. We have been told as teachers that making our students have a more authentic audience will lead to better learning. The simple and great start is to make them read each others work. Technology, especially the laptops, make that so easy to do.

Classroom Observation 3: Short Clips Keep It Real

2009-02-04T14:49:00.001-05:00

Choir
Originally uploaded by weathertation

I visited a choir class and saw a great use of youtube. The teacher told a story about terraced farming, a farming technique some students would have seen south of town. He related that to measures of songs that need to be sung at different volumes. He then showed a two minute clip off youtube of a choir singing the song that he was teaching with the terraced volumes.

This story reminds me of one of my older teachers sho pulled me aside one day and told me that the laptops, moodle and youtube allowed him to stay competitive in the MTV generation. The days of hour long videos are not gone, but their effectiveness has definitely been reduced over the years. Short clips with specific points bring video back into the classroom effectively.

Classroom Observation 3: Laptops for Efficiency

2009-02-04T10:07:00.000-05:00

First off, I know I skipped observation 2. I will come back to it. I just finished observation 3 and though I should report one quick use of the laptops. I visited a choir class, and it integrated technology in great ways. One way was to gain efficiency.

The teacher use a free site called cyberbass.com which has hundreds of songs broken out into their parts. Looking at the list it is limited to songs in the public domain. Since they are learning a Vivaldi piece the students took out their laptops and listend each to their own part for two minutes before practicing. They repeated this for longer when they were learning a new part.

Afterwards the teacher explained that this saved time. Before the laptops he would have played each section's part individually, taking four times the class time. This also creats a managment problem with the other three quarters of the choir. Sitting in the back and timing these events I calculated that he could practice an extra song during a class period. That is 176 extra songs a year.

Classroom Observation Bonus: Two Teachers

2009-01-14T10:50:00.000-05:00

In the high school setting that I work in we rarely think outside the box of having only one adult in a room. A colleague of mine asked me to sit in her exam today for a Spanish conversation class. She is in the hall having private conversations with each student. I am in a wonderful sounding room. She made a list of conversation starting questions and pairs of students are asking each other these questions having conversations in Spanish. My job: write down names of anyone who I hear use English. I have tricked a few.

Getting an adult volunteer to do what I am doing would be easy. How would my exam in physics have been different if I had another person to help with the exam? Could someone else be part of the exam from afar (like on Skype) to make it even more interesting? Just needed a place to write down this idea and reflect on a wonderful experience.

Here is a short mp3 of what the classroom sounds like. The yell near the end is the word for switch where the students all get new speaking partners.

FruFra

PeteSearch: What the Sumerians can teach us about data

The Physics of Osmos Contest « The Physics of Osmos

To submit your entry, follow the instructions below.

Download and install the Osmos free demo. (Or purchase Osmos from the App Store.)

Experiment with your gameplay to illustrate physics concepts using Osmos as your virtual lab.

Review the official contest rules

Create a video illustrating a physics concept.(If you want to record your screen, try Jing or ScreenChomp)

Upload your video to YouTube, Vimeo, or Screencast.com

Complete the submission form by 11:59 PM PST. December 18, 2011.

Winners will be announced on December 25.

Compelling Technology: Cell Phone Camera

The Little People Gather To Worship

Using Google Docs in 3rd Grade: A Road Map To Curriculum Mapping

What is the scaffolding for learning in public? | Beth’s Blog

Simple Drawing Bot

South side

Again

World Made New

WolframAlpha in Physics

Gene Norris

Drawing Graphs

Doing What Works

Family

qBits | Announcing Air Sketch 2.0, with PDF projection!

qBits | MSNBC selects Air Sketch for use on Air

Marla Coleman: The value of summer camp | SummitDaily.com

Family

Physics Is Streetlights

Project Based Learning Resources

Culture in Special Education - Image of God

Culture in Special Education - Work

Culture in Special Education - Parenting

Culture in Special Education - Objectivit

Culture in Special Education - IQ

Culture in Special Education - Individualism

Culture in Special Education - Individualism

A Committee That Worked

Collaborating with Dale

Realities of Teaching

Transitioning to Standards Based Grading

Creativity and Homework

Wordle and Characterization

Ideas for Administrators

Learning Spaces

NCTM 2010 — Day Two

Climate Change

Reasons For Camp (School Too?)

Banana Batteries & Dan Meyer

Wetland Scavenger Hunt

Wetland Scavenger Hunt

Functionalism And The Least Of These

Student as Contributor: The Digital Learning Farm

Student Cell Phones in Learning ((tag:learning

Getting Teachers to Adopt Technology: What to and not to Do

Storytelling for the YouTube Generation

My laptop has a webcam, now what?

Cache the Excitement!

Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter

Think like a statistician – without the math | FlowingData

Inspiration or Learning?

Segment Four Reflection

Segment Three Reflection

Segment Two Reflections

To Know As We Are Known Chapter 5-7 and The Having of Wonderful Ideas

Session 1 Reflections

Reflections

What can you do with this?

To Know As We Are Known: Chapters 1-4

Learning Logs

Standards ((learning,standards))

Father Joe

Acorns

This Is The Day

Pedagogical Autobiography: Future Questions

Pedagogical Autobiography: Failure

Pedagogical Autobiography: FruFra

Pedagogical Autobiography: Traditions

Pedagogical Autobiography: Inquiry

Pedagogical Autobiography: Differentiated Problem Solving

Create a video illustrating a physics concept.
(If you want to record your screen, try Jing or ScreenChomp)